 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 223, 8 October 2007 |
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Welcome to this year's 41st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The big openSUSE 10.3 release week is now behind us. All went without a hitch and many users are enjoying the newest software, improved package management, and extended support for the latest hardware in this new version. No major bugs have been reported so far, but let's wait for the first reviews before concluding that this is indeed openSUSE's best release ever. In other news, Mandriva Linux 2008 has been released to "early seeders", Ubuntu has begun accepting pre-orders for "Gutsy Gibbon", and Judd Vinet has resigned as the lead developer of Arch Linux. Finally, don't miss the featured story of this week - a Susan Linton's report on the major new release from Puppy Linux, version 3.00. Happy reading!
Content:
 Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in ogg (7.9MB) and mp3 (7.6MB) formats (many thanks to Jim Putman)
 Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch
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| Reviews |
First look at Puppy Linux 3.00 (by Susan Linton)
Puppy Linux is a 100 MB distribution that can be used as a live or installed system. Version 3.00 was released this past week to quite a bit of excitement. Many popular web sites have carried the news of this release probably because this is a major update in Puppy development. The primary difference is the use of Slackware 12.0 as the build base and Puppy's compatibility with Slackware 12.0 packages. This makes Puppy Linux 3.00 ideal for newer hardware. However, I was still skeptical when I inserted the new Puppy Linux CD into my HP Pavilion notebook.
First Impressions
There are many boot parameters the user can use to customize their system from the start. Some of these include loading Puppy to RAM, ignoring saved sessions, or no DMA. I booted the default configuration and was soon presented with a dialog box to choose my keyboard. The next interactive phase was the video wizard. This walks the user through setting up their graphics. The first choice is whether to use X.Org or Xvesa. Xvesa is a smaller, light-weight graphical interface ideal for older hardware. I used X.Org. Secondly, I was able to choose resolution and depth, and finally the mode. I was happy that my optimal resolution of 1280x800 was available.
The graphics setup was successful and I was taken to the Puppy desktop. My basic hardware was functional, such as the keyboard, touchpad, USB mouse, sound, and drive support. On the desktop is a Drives icon. Click it to open the Pmount graphical tool to mount, navigate, and unmount any drives or partitions found, including removable media.
However, the first area of real interest is the Internet connection. My laptop contains an Ethernet chip that is not supported natively by Linux, so I must use NdisWrapper to extract and load the Windows drivers. Although NdisWrapper has become a fairly dependable method of making a connection possible, it doesn't always work. It did in Puppy. At the command line it was as simple as typing a few commands, but there is also a graphical utility for setting up the connection. The network wizard requires several steps and clicking back and forth, but it works even with Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). I've tested maybe three distros with graphical network configurations that actually work for my chip. It's an amazing accomplishment. In addition, there's a little Blinky applet in the system tray to monitor the connection. I was impressed and ready to proceed.
The Tools of Puppy Linux
You might expect a distro of less than 100 MB to be configurable solely from the command line, but there are lots of handy graphical configuration tools and system utilities included in Puppy. It has tools to customize the desktop, set up hardware, and install Puppy to other devices.
For the desktop, there are graphical tools to set the background, select the theme, and how you interact with the interface. GTKSet contains settings for mouse acceleration, keyboard auto-repeat, font paths, screensaver, and Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS). The JWM (the default desktop in Puppy Linux) configuration has even more desktop customization settings for the theme, color, and focus model.
In the System menu we find tools to gather information, set up the printer, create partitions, format a floppy, or configure and install a bootloader. The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) browser interface is provided for the user to set up local and remote printers. Pupscan can gather any or all your hardware information and save it to a text file. Usbview shows information on your USB bus and devices. KP allows you to manage running processes. Gcrontab provides an interface for setting up cron jobs (scheduled tasks). GParted and Pdisk are available to modify your partitions. I found all of these tools straightforward and easy to use.
Perhaps the most handy are the wizards found in the Setup menu. These include the Puppy Package Manager, hardware configuration wizards, the Puppy Universal Installer and remastering applications. The hardware configuration wizards walk the user through setting up devices and support. These include the ALSA sound wizard, CD/DVD drive wizard, mouse and keyboard wizard, network wizard, and the X.Org video wizard. Also included in this menu are two ISO remastering applications and the WakePup boot floppy maker. Perhaps the most useful is the Wizard wizard, which is a container for several of the most popular system tools and wizards. All of these in this menu are simple, but useful graphical tools that allow the user to input choices through check boxes, drop down menus, and regular text areas. Many times configuration is much quicker at the command line, but these are quite useful for those without that knowledge at their fingertips.
The Puppy Universal Installer is for installing Puppy Linux to other locations. These include USB Flash drive or USB hard drive, IDE Flash drive, ZIP drive, SATA hard drive, or IDE hard drive. This would be the tool to use if you wish to install Puppy onto your hard drive or a USB stick, for example. It's a basic file copy tool, so one would need to partition and create file systems prior to starting the install. Bootloader options are available, if a bit limited.
Puppy Linux 3.00 desktop
(full image size: 231kB, screen resolution: 1280x800 pixels)
Package Management
Package management is perhaps one of the most important elements of any distro to its users. They want to know they can install their favorite applications without any problems. Puppy handles its package management through another graphical utility called Puppy Package Manager or PET Installer. PETs are the extension and format of the Puppy packages. Start the package manager by clicking the entry in the menu or the PET install icon on the desktop.
In this window there are several choices. When I click on the first button, a browser opens at the PET introduction page. It's an informative series of notes, basic HOWTOs, and links to further information for official PET collections as well as unofficial packages.
The second button opens the local PET software manager. From there I can browse, install, or uninstall PET packages. It's a simple, user-friendly interface. Divided into two frames, one side contains the list of available packages and the other the list of packages I have installed. In the middle are arrows to move packages from one frame to another. Official PETs put an entry in the menu for easy access. Perhaps a search feature might be nice, but the packages are listed in alphabetical order, so it's not so bad. The biggest drawback is that any problems encountered, such as lacking dependencies or not enough disk space, aren't reported until after the install or the fetch.
There are unofficial packages called DotPups. These are packages submitted by community members and can be accessed by the same initial PET install interface. Click on the button under the DotPup packages heading in the PET installer to be taken to a web page for more information.
This release of Puppy Linux is compatible with Slackware 12.0 This opens up their stable package repository to Puppy users. This is an exciting and useful development for the Puppy community. To use Slackware packages, just download them from a Slackware mirror to a local directory and convert them to PET packages. This is much easier than it sounds. There is a utility included in Puppy that will convert the packages for you. It's called tgz2pet, and it is used at the command line. The process is as easy as typing tgz2pet package-version.tgz. Then install them normally through the PET install manager. I tested this process on several packages and had no problems. In addition, in the same Pet Installer, there is a dependency checker. Run this on the newly installed packages to make sure there are no missing dependencies, although PET install will usually inform you if there are any.
There is also a community project working to bring GSlapt to Puppy. This will make using Slackware packages much easier by eliminating the manual downloading and conversion of each individual package. Perhaps it will be officially integrated in future Puppy releases.
Applications and Software
No matter how much effort is put into the system tools, a distro isn't much use without a nice set of applications. Well, despite the small download size, Puppy isn't lacking much in software. They aren't flashy and full of heavy graphics. Basic functionality is emphasized instead.
For multimedia tasks Puppy includes applications to play media files, rip and burn CDs and DVDs, mix and merge sounds and files, apply sound effects, and record files. The main player in Puppy is Gxine, a GNOME/GTK+ front-end for xine. With it I could play AVI, MPEG, MOV, MP3, and MP4 files. This is also the application that is called when viewing websites in SeaMonkey for certain media formats such as streaming QuickTime videos. I could also watch Google, YouTube, and Veoh video files with no problem.
Another interesting application found in the multimedia menu is Soxgui. It is a container for several handy applications for manipulating sound bytes. This is a very handy novice tool for merging two files or normalizing sound volumes, among many other tasks. PBcdripper, Pupdvdtool, ripperX, Burniso2cd, TkDVD, and Grafpup are included for copying and burning your favorite CDs and DVDs.
Under Network we find various applications for connecting to and using the Internet. Puppy comes with three modem dialers as well as the Network wizard mentioned previously and RP-PPPoE for those using Digital Subscriber Line (DSL). There are also monitoring applications such as Firelog, Superscan, SockSpy, and Xnetload. Connect to remote hosts using LinNeighborhood, RemoteDesktop, or TightVNC. Also, RutilT is included to scan for and connect to wireless networks.
Internet is a separate menu and in it are some nice applications and old favorites. SeaMonkey is the primary browser suite of Puppy, but Firefox is available through the Puppy Software Manager. The light-weight NetSurf is also included. Pidgin and Meebo could be used for instant messaging. Axel, Xwget, PupCtorrent, and Transmission are available for file sharing and downloading needs. The gFTP client is there for transferring files to and from FTP servers. Graphical SSH clients are also included.
There are also a few graphics applications. There is Inkscape Lite and mtPaint for creating and "gimping" photos and images. GTKSee is included for image viewing. Grabc and ColorExplorer are there for picking or finding HTML codes for colors. The GIMP is available through the PET installer for those needing more power, although you will need to download some dependencies from Slackware mirrors.
The Document menu contains the word processing and editing applications. AbiWord is the office suite included in the Puppy image, but OpenOffice.org is available. MP, Leafpad, Geany, and e3 are available for smaller tasks. Also included are an online dictionary, PDF viewer, and a PDF converter. Under Calculate we find several Math related applications, such as personal finance software, a spreadsheet, some calculators, and a handy unit converter. Namely, these include ExpenseTracker, Gnumeric, and HomeBank. In the Personal menu are Agenda event manager, DidiWiki personal Wiki, Gpasman (password manager), Ical (appointment book), and NoteCase. There are a few games too; these include Rubix, Gem Game, Bubbles, Tkmines, and Gtkfish.
There are also several graphical file system tools. ROX-filer is the main file manager. There is PRename for batch renaming, several search tools, and a couple of mount tools. I found MUT to be superior to Pmount because one click will mount the media and open a file manager. In addition, Partview, Fragger, Gdmap are also present.
My Conclusions of Puppy Linux
The first thing I noticed was that Puppy Linux is not particularly pretty. The interface seems a tad outdated and the default wallpaper, despite being informative, is probably one of the least attractive I've seen. The included alternate background images aren't much better. It's too bad really that the developers don't spend a bit more time and a few megabytes to enhance the first impression of this otherwise wonderful little distro. However, like all Linux distributions, these looks can be changed to taste. In fact, Puppy can be made to look as beautiful as any other distro out there. Just peruse this Puppy forum thread where community members are showing off their gorgeous Puppy desktops.
While the applications are handy and are a fairly complete starter set, they are lesser known and sometimes unconventional or unfamiliar in appearance. There are other applications available, but the Puppy repository is a bit limited. The DotPup packages extend the offerings, but they too are limited. It helps that Puppy is compatible with Slackware and one can use those packages, but you still may have to do some looking around to find just what you want.
While Puppy has the power of a newer kernel at its foundation and ultimately any hardware supported by other distros will mostly likely be supported in Puppy too, perhaps not everything that is normally "automagically" available in most distros will be functional at first boot of Puppy. One example might be the Internet connection, which may require at least clicking around in the Network wizard. In addition, one may have to do a bit of manual tweaking to get everything working. As stated previously, there are handy dandy wizards for many common areas if needed; however, advanced needs like laptop power saving will require command line work. I was able to load any module I needed, so the foundation is there.
The init and session saving scripts were rewritten for this release of Puppy. The boot-up is fairly fast. However, I experienced a few problems when trying to boot the live system while using the option to ignore the last saved session when I received a kernel panic. Upon the next boot of the live system, some of my customizations were lost, but not all. Subsequent saves and default reboots restored my session as expected.
Otherwise, all the applications and the system as a whole offered good performance and stable operation. It could be a wonderful start, especially for anyone wishing to be a little different, someone needing to save space and resources, or those requiring a portable solution. It'd be really great on a desktop with minimal input, and could be useful on a laptop with a bit more. It may not be the prettiest at the party, but it has a great personality.
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| Miscellaneous News |
openSUSE 10.3 released, Mandriva 2008 seeded, Ubuntu 7.10 available for pre-order, Judd Vinet resigns as Arch Linux project leader
 The long-awaited openSUSE 10.3 was finally released last week as scheduled. Besides all the improvements, updated packages and new features, one noticeable difference between this release and the old stable version 10.2 is the amount of community coverage following the launch of news.opensuse.org a few months ago. This site has now become the official mouthpiece of the project, with daily coverage of openSUSE topics that include interviews with the developers, introduction to new features, and updates about community happenings. It culminated in the excellent Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3: A Plethora of Improvements, published just before the product's official release. The openSUSE news site is a fantastic effort of the writers - the articles are clear and concise, they include screenshots to illustrate the points, and they reveal much of what's happening under the hood of openSUSE. We are still waiting for any comprehensive reviews, but judging by the first impressions found in the blogsphere, the reaction is mostly positive. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section.
openSUSE 10.3 includes a plethora of improvements and the latest open source software innovations.
(full image size: 536kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
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 Next on the release calendar - Mandriva Linux 2008. Slightly delayed from the original release schedule, the ISO images of Mandriva's "PowerPack" and "Free" editions were finally made available to the "early seeders" over the weekend. There is still no news as to when the official launch might occur, but based on the distribution's previous releases, some point later this week looks like a realistic candidate. Mandriva Linux 2008 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.22.9 and includes glibc 2.6.1, a release candidate of GCC 4.2.2, X.Org 7.2 (xorg-server 1.3.0.0), KDE 3.5.7, GNOME 2.20.0 and all the usual open source software packages. The commercial "PowerPack" edition and the freely downloadable "One" live CD also come with proprietary graphics drivers, while the "Free" edition is limited to free software only. While Mandriva's recent release candidates didn't get as much media and blog coverage as the openSUSE ones, those users who took the time to report about their experiences were mostly impressed with the new product. Will Mandriva Linux 2008 mean a major breakthrough for the company that has historically struggled to keep their finances in the black? Let's hope so!
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 One of the exciting, but somewhat controversial feature of the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 is CompizFusion, enabled by default wherever supported by the suitable graphics card. But what exactly is CompizFusion and why is it such an interesting technology? Forlorn's Blog attempts to answer the question: "Compiz is a window manager, which means that it takes care of all the basic needs to interact with the windows on your desktop - like moving, minimizing and resizing. In GNOME the default window manager is Metacity. Most people won't have even heard about it, because it's integrated into the desktop environment and its name is not mentioned anywhere. This results in the fact that the usual user isn't aware of the mere existence of such software or rather that it's a separated application that can be replaced like any other on Linux. The bottom line is: Ubuntu's desktop effects are not just an enhancement of the desktop environment but a replacement of a specific part of it."
On a related note, Ubuntu's ShipIt system has started accepting pre-orders for "Gutsy Gibbon".
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  It is always a sad occasion when the founder of a distribution decides to leave the project he created. But such is life - the developers' interests and availability of free time are factors that can change easily throughout a person's life. Arch Linux's Judd Vinet has not been involved with the distribution for several months so his resignation came as no surprise to most of his co-developers: "I plan to step down as leader of Arch Linux and pass the torch. The reason for this is that I do not have the time to devote towards a leadership role in a project the size of Arch Linux, and Arch deserves someone who does. It needs some work, it needs some unification, and it needs someone at the helm who can devote a lot of time to it. I've given it a lot of thought, and based on the state of things, all-round competencies, initiatives, and willingness, I would like to pass this leadership role on to Aaron Griffin, also known as 'Phrakture' on IRC and the forums." Besides the formal announcement, the founder of Arch Linux gave a few hints about his future plans on his personal blog. So thanks for a great distribution and let's hope that the project will continue to go from strength to strength despite Judd's absence!
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It was, by general consensus, one of the most entertaining posts for some time. Answering the usual "what is the best distro" question, a poster in last week's DistroWatch Weekly came up with the following parody (reprinted here for those who don't read the comments, but who enjoy a good laugh every now and then): "This is an interesting meta discussion, but I just have to post here to mention the Greatest Linux Distro out there: (fill in the blank). I just can't believe everybody is not using (fill in the blank) and so many crappy distros like (fill in the blank), (fill in the blank) and (fill in the blank), are still ranked high in the page hit rankings here. Before I discovered (fill in the blank) I was always trying to get my (fill in the blank) to work properly and my (fill in the blank) to at least (fill in the blank) let alone (fill in the blank). Now, everything just works! I've even decided to contribute several dollars to the developer(s) of (fill in the blank) even though I can't afford it with my part-time job as a (fill in the blank) at (fill in the blank), but at least it is a token of my (fill in the blank). For those of you who have not yet tried (fill in the blank), I urge you to go to www.(fill in the blank).com and download the ISO and let the magic begin. (fill in the blank) for President!"
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| Released Last Week |
Puppy Linux 3.00
Barry Kauler has announced the release of Puppy Linux 3.00: "Puppy 3.00 released. This Puppy is a massive upgrade from the previous (v2.17.1) version. I decided to aim for close binary compatibility with Slackware 12.0, with the objective of being able to install Slackware packages and have all or most of the required dependencies already in place. To that end, I used all the building block packages from Slackware 12, such as glibc 2.5, GCC 4.1.2 and GTK+ 2.10.13. Most of the libraries in Puppy are now from Slackware. Another major thing that I have done is totally rewritten the key scripts that control how Puppy boots up, is configured, and shuts down. Then there are some major breakthroughs, such as finally getting periodic flushing of RAM to Flash drive working properly." Read the complete release notes for a detailed list of changes and improvements.
SystemRescueCd 0.4.0
A new major version of SystemRescueCd, a Gentoo-based distribution with focus on disk partitioning and data rescue tasks, has been released. What's new? "Added PXE network booting support; added a 64-bit kernel (rescue64) to chroot on a 64-bit Linux; added a 32-bit alternative kernel (vmlinuz2) based on 2.6.20.19; updated the default 32-bit kernel (rescuecd) to 2.6.22.9 (with Reiser4); added Partimage client with SSL support; updated the e1000 network driver; updated the 'Offline NT Password & Registry Editor' disk (Vista support); added option 'minishell' to debug the initramfs and the start-up scripts; updated Squashfs to version 3.2 (with LZMA support); optimized and cleaned the linuxrc start-up script; updated Oscar (French tool to backup computers); updated ntfs-3g to 1.913...." Read the changelog for more details.
Yoper Linux 3.0.1
Tobias Gerschner has announced the release of Yoper Linux 3.0.1: "The Yoper team is proud to announce the first (and only) maintenance release of Yoper Linux 3.0, code name 'Titanium'. This release ships with Kernel 2.6.21.1, including the Ken Colivas patch set with the SD scheduler, X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.7, KOffice 1.6.3, Firefox 2.0.0.7 and a vast range of other cutting-edge desktop packages. The unstable repository also contains a kernel with the CFS scheduler for those who are keen to compare their performance under different workloads. Since 3.0 there have been more than 500 new or updated packages, as well as numerous bug fixes and clean-ups. If you have Yoper 3.0 installed, simply use the smart upgrade function to update the packages. There are only minor and mostly visual differences between a default installation of 3.0 and 3.0.1." Here is the full release announcement.
openSUSE 10.3
Novell has announced the release of openSUSE 10.3: "Novell today announced the availability of openSUSE 10.3, the newest version of the award-winning community Linux distribution. Enhancements to openSUSE 10.3 include the newest versions of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments, including a KDE 4 preview. OpenOffice.org 2.3 makes sharing files easy, and the newest version of AppArmor protects the Linux operating system and applications from attacks, viruses and malicious applications. OpenSUSE 10.3 also now includes MP3 support out of the box for Banshee and Amarok, which are the default media players in openSUSE. In addition, openSUSE 10.3 offers the latest open source applications for developing applications, setting up a home network and running a web server." Read the press release and release announcement for more information.
Parsix GNU/Linux 0.90r2
Alan Baghumian has announced the availability of the second revision of Parsix GNU/Linux 0.90: "An updated version of Parsix GNU/Linux 0.90, code,name Barry, has been released. Barry r2 merges all published updates from Parsix and Debian testing repositories as of Oct 3, 2007. Several bugs have been solved, including installer crash problem in languages other than English. Highlights: GNOME 2.18.3, Linux kernel 2.6.20.1 with CK and Suspend2 patches, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, GNU Iceweasel 2.0.0.6, Pidgin 2.2.0 and more. Users who regularly update their systems using apt, do not need to download this version. Note that this is the last maintenance release of Parsix Barry series and will be supported until one month after the next release of the Parsix GNU/Linux project, called 'Ramon' (version 1.0)." More details in the release announcement and release notes.
Zenwalk Linux 4.8
Jean-Philippe Guillemin has announced the release of Zenwalk Linux 4.8 "The Zenwalk Team is happy to announce the Zenwalk 4.8 release. After several release-candidates, it seems that we are ready for a very stable release. Kernel is now at 2.6.22.9, with its new wireless stack, tickless clock and 1000 Hz scheduler for better reactivity while lowering power consumption (ideal for laptops). Talking about applications, the very visible change in 4.8 is the substitute of Firefox and Thunderbird into the equivalent GNU licence versions, named Iceweasel and Icedove. Video and X.Org auto-configuration has been improved to handle wide-screen monitors as well as to provide full features for Synaptics touchpads. The fine-tuning of the user interface continues with new desktop artwork, new bootsplash." Read the full release announcement to learn more about the new features in Zenwalk Linux 4.8.
Arch Linux 2007.08-2
Tobias Powalowski has announced the release of Arch Linux 2007.08-2: "Arch Linux 2007.08-2 'Don't Panic' has been released. This is the first release to use our new repository layout. There are two ISOs - FTP and Core. Changelog: kernel 2.6.22.9 usage; disabled arch_addons hook by default, it is now triggered by arch-addons boot parameter; fixed the nasty /dev mount bug; fixed the /dev/ttyS0 errors if no serial port is installed in the system; fixed repositories in install environment to fit to both architectures; fixed km to not show broken characters after exit; fixed GRUB installation with XFS file system; fixed package clearing if setup option was chosen; added PPTP client to install environment; added sdparm to install environment; added all free wireless drivers to install environment...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a complete list of changes.
Granular Linux 2007 "Fireworks"
Here is something interesting for the Linux distro testing community: a distribution with four desktops (KDE, Xfce, Enlightenment and Looking Glass 3D) and complete multimedia support - all on an installable live DVD: "On behalf of Team Granular, I happily announce the immediate availability of the first DVD edition of Granular Linux - FunWorks 2007. Some of the major features include: four desktop environments - KDE 3.5.7, XFce 4.4.1, Enlightenment (E17) and Looking Glass (LG3D), updated most major and small applications, more stable, bug-free and feature-rich release, 5.5+ GB of software packed in just 1.92 GB live DVD, and out-of-the-box support for virtually all multimedia formats, and improved support for Flash, Java and media streaming in web browsers." Read the full release announcement and visit the screenshots page for further information.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
New distributions added to waiting list
- Alegna Linux. Alegna Linux is a Spanish distribution based on Ubuntu. Besides standard Ubuntu, it offers better localisation into Spanish, popular multimedia codecs and browser plugins, and out-of-the-box support for 3D desktops with Beryl.
- Elbuntu. Elbuntu is an Ubuntu-based distribution with an objective of providing the maximum eye candy for the end user using the Enlightenment window manager and related libraries.
- KinuX Linux. KinuX Linux is a new Brazilian desktop distribution based on Slackware Linux. Its main features are "Candy" - a universal package manager, "KKaroto" - a media centre developed with C++, Xine and Qt, and "Copier" - a very simple installer.
- Linius. Linius is an openSUSE-based Portuguese Linux distribution, developed for the use at Portugal's Ministry of Justice.
- Mythbuntu. Mythbuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu with the focus on providing a simple way of setting up a MythTV box using Ubuntu sources.
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DistroWatch database summary
And this concludes the latest issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 15 October 2007.
Ladislav Bodnar
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Puppy (by nightflier on 2007-10-08 13:19:25 GMT from United States)
Nice review of Puppy. Quirky, but worth a look.
2 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Johannes Eva on 2007-10-08 13:20:36 GMT from Germany)
Well, in fact, I just wanted to post the first comment :)
Just tried OpenSUSE 10.3 on my dell X1 and was very, very disappointed. Buggy installation, buggy package management, no write to ntfs out of the box, etc. Wait for something else or try Mandriva.
And as always: Great job Ladislav!
3 • No subject (by Tony on 2007-10-08 13:20:52 GMT from United States)
Thanks Ladislav for another good edition of DW.
I just left the Ubuntu shipit site and was greated with this message. "ShipIt is currently closed We'll be back in a few days, shipping Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) CDs."
4 • openSUSE 10.3 (by Johnny on 2007-10-08 13:20:59 GMT from United States)
been running it for 4 days now, and I have yet to find a bug. the updater is worlds faster (<30 sec. on 10.3 versus <90 seconds on 10.2 on the same hardware.)
5 • Thanks (by Alvinistic on 2007-10-08 13:21:55 GMT from Singapore)
Is it just me but I feel that DWW used to be released a bit earlier. Nevertheless, thanks Ladislav for another great DWW!
I also wanna express thanks to Judd for inventing Arch. Arch is getting lots of changes recently (kernel-based release, reshuffled repository). Hope it's for the better!
6 • openSUSE 10.3 (by Caraibes on 2007-10-08 13:26:44 GMT from Dominican Republic)
It has been 4 days now, that I installed the i386 Gnome cd of openSUSE 10.3. This was simply out of curiosity, distro-hopping, if you like.
Good point, I had only one 700 megs iso to download. Bad point, the install took almost 3 hours ! But apart from the long time it took, the installer was very clear and precise.
Everything seemed to work fine. On day 1, I had some issues with the Skype install, that I solved on day 2 (I had to manually fish for some missing libs...)...
On day 2 I had X crashing because of launching Google Earth, but it seemed to have healed on its own (???)
On day 3, I started bitching to myself that openSUSE 10.3 was really slow, because I rebooted in my Fedora partition,and everything was just faster ! But it seems that either I am getting used to it, or it is not that slow...
One thing that I was particularly disappointed with, was that I was aiming for a 100% "non-KDE" system. I am very happy with Brasero and Banshee... But for such a trivial app as Xchm or GnomeCHM, that I couldn't find anywhere, I had to install KchmViewer, as it was the only CHM reader available for Suse ! Thus "polluting" my system with KDE libs ! I can't live without a CHM reader because of all those ebooks in that format...
Anyway, I was expecting more than anything Mandriva 2008 Free. I will download asap. But overall, I can't say openSUSE 10.3 is bad. It is very innovative (web based apps repositories with "one click install"). Fantastic way to install all the "ugly" forbidden codecs with only "one click"...
Many things to learn and to be re-used in other distros !
7 • openSUSE 10.3 (by Whitt Madden on 2007-10-08 13:33:22 GMT from United States)
I installed openSUSE 10.3 using vmware, and I had no issues at all with the install. It went very smooth. Once the install was completed, I was presented with a very nice looking desktop. I think the addition of adding community repos during the install was a MAJOR plus for them. I remember on older versions, have to manually add all of the extra repositories, and it was slow, and buggy, and generally a pain to use. Looks like they've improved in a lot of areas. I used the GNOME install cd, because I have always felt GNOME just never got the attention KDE was getting from the development team. Looks like that has changed as well. I will say that I am not a huge fan of the opensuse menu layouts in GNOME or KDE, but that is just my preference. All in all, I would like to say to the opensuse developers- "GREAT JOB!" They have a default GNOME desktop that is almost as good as Ubuntu's.
8 • looking glass? (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 13:33:23 GMT from United States)
I noticed a distro release on the front page that features as one of it's desktops Looking Glass. Can anyway tell me what it's about? I know of the E17, fluxbox, openbox, window maker windows managers, xfce, kde and gnome desktop environments, but I thought that was it for major environments. Hmm...
9 • @6 Install Firefox Extension (by Alvinistic on 2007-10-08 13:33:26 GMT from Singapore)
@6 Caraibes,
You can actually install a firefox extension named CHM Reader which allows you open CHM files in firefox.
Here is the link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3235
10 • Arch and other things (by Jesper Sandström on 2007-10-08 13:36:23 GMT from Sweden)
Sad to see that Judd is leaving, I believe he has created the best allround distro to date. I came to Arch as newbie, with no administration-via-CLI-skills at all. Still, I found it a whole lot easier to set up than my previous favourites Suse and Ubuntu. I encourage all who haven't yet, to try Arch. If you're lucky, you'll experience the same revelation I did.
Also, let's hope that the latest installment of openSUSE is better than the two before it. It has always struck me as the most professional of all in its appearance, sadly that professional image has failed to work out in many places. It has seemed slow compared to others, and buggy at times. Can't wait to see the first proper review
11 • re: 6 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 13:44:34 GMT from United States)
That was my experience as well it took a really long time to install it, and I used the default package selection. Not sure why it was so slow.
I liked opensuse picking up the correct aspect ratio of my monitor, and everything I needed but the nvidia driver was installed, and installing the nvidia driver wasn't too hard.
But I have had bugs to deal with, and I'm not sure whether I'll give this distro a thumbs up or not. Way better than the previous releases, but I have to spend more time with it and decide if the bugs piss me off or not.
12 • RE: 3 ShipIt (by ladislav on 2007-10-08 13:45:09 GMT from Taiwan)
I also just left the Ubuntu ShipIt site and there, in a big square, I saw this: "I want to pre-order CDs of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)".
13 • Puppy 3.0 (by Caraibes on 2007-10-08 13:45:46 GMT from Dominican Republic)
First of all, thank you very much to Alvinistic for the CHM reader ! I will use it !
Second of all, a last word about SUSE : addind repos is now so easy, it is a great job !
Now, let's talk about Puppy. I left my SUSE desktop to boot another PC with Puppy 3.0, to write this comment. I want to say that I always have been using Puppy as a troubleshooting tool and for rescueing datas from damaged PC's (mostly WIndows)...
I never really used it as a main distro, but I value the work of the team.
I think it is good that it is Slackware 12 compatible, because I could install such apps as TVtime (can't live without it on my main box !!!)... Or others, of course, from Linuxpaquages...
Anyway, good job !
Nice read this morning, DWW is always at its best during "distro season" ! ;-)
Now we have Mandriva comming, and later, the *Buntus... Good... All good !
14 • Puppy (by hawk on 2007-10-08 13:46:20 GMT from Germany)
Sorry but cant hold it: why on earth three modem dialers. In case two dont work - no offense meant.
But on the other hand - mentioning meebo as a possible IM client as a feature of a distribution is strange. I guess then every distribution has that feature. It is like advertising: you can browse www.bbc.co.uk/news with that distro.
Overall I am somehow not too impressed though I like the slackware derivates.
cheers
15 • Mandriva (by werner at 2007-10-08 13:51:23 GMT from France)
Hope we that Mandriva managed it now, that work automatically at least these modems used in France, via pppoe or when it have only usb via pppae. This are f.ex. livebox of wanadoo/orange and speedtouch 530v6 of only/ool/outremer-telecom and tele2. Otherwhise it continues to be a dead-birth ...
16 • re: 14 about Meebo (by Caraibes on 2007-10-08 13:58:29 GMT from Dominican Republic)
-Why Meebo ???
-Good question !
I think I have the answer, at least from my perspective :
Puppy used to have Gaim 1.5, which was always disconnecting from the networks (msn, yahoo, gtalk...).
Now it says it has Pidgin, but I am on Puppy 3.0 right now, and I try to launch it... No way... It doesn't want to launch...
Maybe this s why they have made Meebo available. I am using it right now. It is a good tool. Particularly if you use an older Mac, with OS 9 or early OSX... Then you don't need to install any IM...
17 • Missing distro icon pics (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 13:59:43 GMT from United States)
Someone tell me what I'm missing, here...
I no longer see the distro pics next to Distrowatch news items and articles. I get the Alt text in strikeout form. I'm sure it's my problem, but, I don't recall changing anything in Firefox, and no other websites are missing images. And, everything looks fine in Konqueror.
AND, I couldn't post this from Firefox. I get sent to this page:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=
Trying from Konqueror...
18 • Project Looking Glass (by nedvis on 2007-10-08 14:02:35 GMT from United States)
Sun Microsystems Looking Glass Project:
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/
http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/details.xml
http://www.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/
19 • SuSe 10.3 has wifi issues, but still good (by davemc on 2007-10-08 14:04:01 GMT from United States)
I installed the GNOME varient to my new HP Laptop this weekend and the experience was simply put -- Wonderful!.. Only so long as I stayed connected via Ethernet. As soon as I tried to get Wireless working it got real ugly, real fast! My needs are simple -- Dell 1390 (bcm 4311 renamed) chipset, yet SuSe stuttered and choked on it worse than a you know what! My attempts to get it working following the extremely sparse documentation, forums, wiki's, etc from the SuSe sites resulted in somehow losing my X server?!!!
Bottom line, if you run a newer wifi chipset, steer clear of this distro!
20 • Ubuntu Shipit (by Eric on 2007-10-08 14:07:54 GMT from Netherlands)
My shipit response was: "The Ubuntu community would like to thank you for your contributions to the Ubuntu project. In recognition of this, we offer you an expanded set of options for your ShipIt request." - Can't wait ill 7.10 arrives.
Eric
21 • OpenSUSE (by linuxjunkie on 2007-10-08 14:08:02 GMT from United States)
My experience was mixed with OpenSUSE 10.3. I used on two machines. One was an upgrade from 10.2 and the other was a fresh install. The upgrade worked fine, however I kept getting package errors on the new install. Has anyone else had this problem ?
22 • Re Post 8 (by Anthonye on 2007-10-08 14:09:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
That would be the new Granular 0.9. don't bother with it. Looking Glass itself doesn't work, and as soon as you download any updates, they wipe out all the repositories. It's based on PCLinux OS... but enable those repos, and at the end of it, hardly anything actually works, however many times you click on them. Nice idea... if and when the bugs get squashed, it has promise. But not yet!
23 • opensuse 10.3 (by wegface on 2007-10-08 14:12:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ive found it to be fairly typical of opensuse releases, buggy slow and over-rated. The installer is swishy, and detailed,but its quite slow, and not without a few strange glitches along the way. Software management is still clunky and random in its success. One click install just didnt work when i tried it. Apps simply failed to run. IMO it simply doesnt compare to certain MUCH smaller distributions.
24 • Ubuntu Shipit (by Alvinistic on 2007-10-08 14:15:09 GMT from Singapore)
Just wanna confirm that Ubuntu Shipit works here. I just ordered my Gutsy ;)
25 • No subject (by Sager on 2007-10-08 14:17:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
Maybe it would be evident from Susan's report but she didn't explicitly mention that Puppy Linux can be used on really old hardware to good effect (even those old ISA sound cards can be resurrected - extremely worthwhile as they are vastly superior to anything available this last half decade). Only proviso is that memory, preferably with swap space back-up may need upgrading [eg 96Mb main memory + >=60Mb swap, but <=~200Mb swap].
Why is this important? Saves landfill! Results are often faster than some extremely well-known OSes demanding Gb s of cpu cycles and ditto memory. That alone makes it worthwhile. If you have a bone to pick with you-know-who about his illegal business practices, makes it doubly satisfying.
26 • openSUSE 10.3 Installable Live-CDs (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 14:27:24 GMT from Germany)
Just remember that there will be installable Live-CDs of openSUSE 10.3 released soon if you hesitate to try the install media right away...
27 • OS 10.3 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 14:27:29 GMT from United States)
19: That's useful info for me. That's a tough wifi card for Fedora 7 (which my laptop runs now) but following the documentation it can be done with F7.
As far as opensuse 10.3, despite the boasts about a one CD installation, as far as I can tell, there is no installable live CD. So for someone like me, who is not too familiar with opensuse (tried 10.1, but we know what happened there) I would have to download two CD's, which is still quite a burden.
Guess I will skip opensuse 10.3.
28 • opensuse 10.3 (by MikeH on 2007-10-08 14:27:38 GMT from United States)
I downloaded openSuse 10.3 on Saturday and had no trouble installing it on my laptop. I find it much improved over 10.2 and certainly much easier to configure. And the package managerment is superior to 10.2 as well. The installation was long, but it was wonderful that it detected my wireless card during the install so that updates could be downloaded right away. And it is faster than 10.2 during boot and less sluggish to work with.
Overall I would have to say that 10.3 is superior to 10.2 in almost every way. But I have to admit that I prefer the blue theme to the green theme. Fortuanately it is easy to change.
29 • 26 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 14:31:10 GMT from United States)
Okay, you posted while I was typing, I will wait for an installable live CD.
30 • @ # 17 - missing distro icons (by relativ at 2007-10-08 14:39:57 GMT from United States)
I'd like to second the missing icon problem. I also get the Alt text in strikeout form. I get no icons at distrowatch.com and only in Firefox. Distrowatch.com in Internet Explorer DOES give me distro icons. Also, in Firefox, these sites DO show icons for the distros ...http://distrowatch.lafox.net/, http://distrowatch.gds.tuwien.ac.at/, http://distrowatch.cz/, http://dw.rohost.com/.... So the problem is only at distrowatch.com and only in Firefox.... I've been having this problem for several months... I also cant post this message in Firefox.. I had to use IE.
Any ideas Ladislav?
rel
31 • openSUSE 10.3 and Puppy 3 (by capricornus on 2007-10-08 14:45:36 GMT from Belgium)
openSuSE 10.3 was my first encounter with this dino-like distro. It took amazingly long to be installed, connecting with and downloading from home base, eating up my ADSL-10GB-per-month download reserve. It didn't give me anything more than I'm already used to by downloading and installing and trying (and removing) about everything that comes on distrowatch. It's amazingly slow but all encompassing, and not kind to a newbee. It' s like a hummer when you need a bike to get there.
Puppy 3 is the tiny one that gets me there, on every machine till now. Amazingly swift and agile and quick! But it let me down with my CrossOver: no bottle is accepted to be installed by this one (while Slackware-based Wolvix does it without barking). And it let me down looking for VLC to be installed: no way. But gxine does the job +/-. Puppy had itself installed on my HD without major problems, every distro asks questions, why not with this one. And this one shows up in excellent video-settings. My appreciation for this breed!
32 • Qu 15 Is Mandriva a "death bird" (by dbrion on 2007-10-08 14:49:00 GMT from France)
"
Hope we that Mandriva managed it now, that work automatically at least these modems used in France, via pppoe or when it have only usb via pppae. This are f.ex. livebox of wanadoo/orange and speedtouch 530v6 of only/ool/outremer-telecom and tele2. Otherwhise it continues to be a dead-birth ..."
I am very surprised :
a) why should heavily localized modems (at least, I hope , for non French counties and for supra-minimal quality) be supported by Mandriva?
b) Is non supporting some kind of very dubious HW a matter of death?
of ornithology?
c) Some of my friends have Mandrivas installed, and I suppose they browse the web (which I do not on *my* laptops) : I know that they are very methodical and that, before installing, they have all the ennoying issues printed on *paper*.... it is just a matter of common sense....
FYI I was glad to VMplay and qemu-late Mandriva 2008.0 (they made huge progresses w/r to broken pakages; the rest was nice, as usual : I suppose it is part of her *long* , long, long ritual agony) and I recommended a colleague to install a SUSE on her professional laptop, as she had some support.. We remain in excellent terms... (in case one thought an infamous death-bird bribed me).
33 • Trouble Free Exp on openSuSE 10.3 (by Sam on 2007-10-08 14:50:35 GMT from United States)
Okay, from the above comments regarding other people's experience of running openSUSE 10.3, I have to wonder if I'm alone in not having more than 1 bug.
I downloaded the 10.3 release candidate a little over two weeks ago. Running on a Dell Inspiron 6400 (yeah, crappy, but I was needing a cheap laptop quick) with Intel945 graphics and a bcmxx onboard wifi. The only bug I had until this week was the suspend-to-ram feature failed to recover. That bug went away with an update late last week.
The other bug I've hit is: I installed the 1-CD KDE release candidate. This weekend I wanted to give the Gnome desktop a try. Installing gnome went quickly and performed well, but this morning in KDE my flashy new openSUSE updater is missing from my system... I can still perform updates (I think!) in YAST (old-school style), but I miss my system update icon. Made me feel special.
Oh well, at least World of Warcraft runs without a hitch!
34 • 17 & 30 missing icons - SOLVED (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 14:53:23 GMT from United States)
Wow, I didn't really expect to find someone else with the same problem. I think I found it, so my cry for help may have at least helped another person...
I just remembered a config change I had made, to accommodate a site that searches Craigslist.
In about:config, it's network.http.sendRefererHeader
set that back to 2, and see what happens
35 • Opne Sesame V 10.3 (by Chicken on 2007-10-08 14:54:14 GMT from South Africa)
Man-oh-Man - what a production - even though there is no live install - I took the plunge with the one [Gnome] CD rumba & was pleasantly surprised by all the crashes, kernel panics & lockups!! All seemed to magically heal with each cold boot. But cannot install anything via the one click samba - even SKYPE refuses??
Other than it is purty!! dont know what to do with it - guess I am spoiled rotten by PCLOS - hear/hear/there/there Amigos!! It just hauls-ass Period.
Seriously - I was hoping for a really good Gnome experience - has anyone tried Granular? - looks real good that - Looking Glass (LG3D - desktop piece they have with all the open apps - I still have Suzi loaded - hoping it will improve - otherwise its history.. strangely the net is full of the same complaints - from day one. It has an almost Xandros proprietary feel to it. Too rigid!!
36 • OPEN SUSE (by tom at 2007-10-08 14:57:00 GMT from United States)
WOW
Let me first say, normally I am not a fan of .rpm systems normally preferring .deb or pacman and I have been disappointed by previous versions of Open SUSE due to bloat and seemingly sluggish response times.
Nonetheless, I am very impressed with Open SUSE. What a pleasure to install. I had complete control of the process down to what packages were (or were not) installed.
Features almost auto configured during the install:
1. My network shares were recognized and fstab was configured (All I had to provide was the server address and what options I wanted for fstab [via a gui interface for fstab]).
2. Separate /home with the option to encrypt.
3. Repos were configured (I seem to recall this was not the case with previous installs of SUSE) and the system checked for updates (at the time of installation). Now I know it was just released, still I for one appreciate the option to install updates out of the box rather then one of the first tasks post install.
4. Outstanding package selection (or deslection).
5. Multimedia support was outstanding.
Post install I was surprised to find that, unlike previous versions, the bloat has been reduced (there is still some ...) but previous versions of SUSE have been frankly sluggish where 10.3 was not.
What a pleasure. If not for windows (software) compatibility issues OPEN SUSE could easily bring Linux to the masses.
37 • RE: SOLVED (by relativ at 2007-10-08 14:57:48 GMT from United States)
Hey... look at that. I set network.http.sendRefererHeader back to 2 and BINGO!! I got icons back.
this has been bugging me for the longest time... Thanks for the fix.
(but I'll probably still leave it set to 0)
rel.
38 • Correction (by linbetwin on 2007-10-08 14:58:26 GMT from Romania)
Ladislav, Mandriva ships with GNOME 2.20, not 2.6.20.
39 • SuSe 10.3 (by Gilbert Morrow on 2007-10-08 15:01:01 GMT from United States)
Installed SuSe 10.3 , KDE single CD install most went well but KDE Kmenu is slow when first activated , hard drive spins for 5 to 10 seconds before Kmenu opens but after that works fine .
Kinternet will not self start (auto run) on boot , and Compiz does not function correctly with out some command line entries , even then not completely , Nvidia graphics card 7800GS (come on guys I actually use some of the features in Compiz) , but some thing are looking better than the last few releases .
Will have to say in regards to the Verizon EVDO card we have YaST picked it up and was a breeze to configure , most distros will not pick it up and if they do it takes several commands to get it function .
Out of 10 a 8 .
40 • RE: 17, 30 (by ladislav on 2007-10-08 15:04:27 GMT from Taiwan)
If you can't see the graphics on the site it's because your browser does not provide a referrer field. The php scripts on the site check that you are trying to view the graphics while browsing DistroWatch and not some other web site (in other words, it prevents "hotlinking" which just generates useless traffic for the server). If your browser does not provide a referrer field to the web server then it doesn't know where you come from and refuses to display the graphics. Enable the referrer and all will be fine.
As for not being able to post in the forum, it's the same problem (missing referrer field), but a different reason - to some spam bots from posting via locally cached HTML forms.
41 • OpenSuse 10.3 (by San on 2007-10-08 15:05:08 GMT from Belgium)
I installed some Opensuse Betas, based on the look :) Ubuntu's been my main distro for over a year now and I wanted to see if OpenSuse could beat it.
It definitely looks better, and I love the installer, but on my pc it was much slower (especially installing software). In the end I switched back.
Gutsy just feels a lot faster.
I intend to install the latest Mandriva and Fedora, to see how they perform.
42 • Gutsy Shipit (by kanishka on 2007-10-08 15:06:03 GMT from Italy)
Just pre-ordered my 2 Ubuntu CDs...
43 • Puppy (by Ruben on 2007-10-08 15:10:00 GMT from Belgium)
It's great to have Puppy on an old usb-stick in your pocket. It once saved my week, as I was still able to do my dayjob when my notebook crashed.
Also, very handy if you have to move quickly between locations where pc's are available (e.g. observatory - home).
44 • @25 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-08 15:22:28 GMT from Canada)
Most 'old ISA sound cards' can be used on any distribution, as the drivers are part of OSS/Free and ALSA, both of which are shipped by virtually all distros.
45 • opensuse 10.3 (by qian on 2007-10-08 15:26:55 GMT from Denmark)
well i would like to try opensuse 10.3 but my wireless just don't work and it seems to be a problem for most using intel pro/wireless 3945abg with wpa2 enabled, so far no one has come up with a solution making it work. i guess i just wait for mandriva 2008 and hope it works there.
46 • Finally, no distro hoping anymore. (by Kensai on 2007-10-08 15:38:15 GMT from Puerto Rico)
I just, made myself an Arch Linux box and has been here for 2 weeks, without reinstalling neither trying out other distros. I always found my way coming back to Arch so I thought this would be it, and yeah it is. Nice DWW.
47 • Re: Trouble Free Exp on openSuSE 10.3 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 15:40:36 GMT from Germany)
> but this morning in KDE my flashy new openSUSE updater is missing from my system
There is a bug that removes the opensuse-updater-kde package when you install the GNOME pattern (which includes opensuse-updater-gnome), just reinstall it.
48 • suse (by Caplin Wallberger on 2007-10-08 15:44:53 GMT from United States)
For anyone thinking of trying suse 10.3 I'd suggest having at least a dual core processor and 2GB RAM - it's the bloatiest of the bloaty! Package management is also a bit of a nightmare to set up as well. It looks quite nice and is quite polished, but there's also the Microsoft taint to consider as well.
Just not worth it.
49 • 10.3 Rocks (by apokryphos on 2007-10-08 15:47:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
The openSUSE 10.3 release completely rocks. There's so many new things and innovation around the place that's so amazing. Awesome stuff!!!
50 • Better distros to choose (by Neomaxi on 2007-10-08 15:56:25 GMT from United States)
Still bulky, Package manager is to hard to setup.
YAST is terrible.
No live CD.
Feels more like 10.2.1
Still way to involved to install.
If they are trying to get newbies to use Linux.. .then they are on the wrong path......
51 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 15:56:36 GMT from United States)
> there's also the Microsoft taint to consider as well
You mean they are including Microsoft software? I was under the impression that a basic install was only GPL software. What am I missing here? Do you mean Microsoft is now contributing GPL software? Codecs are included by default? Moonlight (but that is not from Microsoft)?
52 • Re: 33 openSUSE 10.3 (by Sam on 2007-10-08 15:59:34 GMT from United States)
Correction: After firing up a couple more brain cells post coffee-cup #2 and work project #5 for the morning, I realized: If you download the KDE one-CD of openSUSE, and then install Gnome from repositories, openSUSE for some reason (at least on my machine) removes the kde-interface to the openSUSE-updater and in its place installs the gnome-interface. This gnome-interface doesn't appear on KDE. You need to go back to the repositories in yast and re-install the KDE interface. Works like a charm after that. Interestingly, YAST's updater claimed this morning there were no updates available for my system -- after re-installing the KDE-interface to openSUSE-updater, four bug fix updates were available... odd...
Honestly though I'm noticing some pretty vitriolic and negative reactions to SUSE in the above posts. While I understand having technical glitches getting the distro to work on your system can be frustrating (if you encounter those glitches), the negativity from some folks who bash the distro without describing bugs makes me wonder.
"It is monstrously slow."
"A dinosaur"
"Bloated"
"Takes forever to install software"
"Repositories were horrible to setup" (really? did ya try the new one-click setup for community repositories??)
"Remember Microsoft deal..." (ah... I think I see now).
53 • OpenSuse 10.3 (by CeVO on 2007-10-08 16:10:28 GMT from Spain)
Tried it in VirtualBox, but it failed miserably. Very pretty install screen and all, so design wise, they seem to have their act together.
Maybe some virtualbox client driver is missing, but apart from being slow, it bailed out halfway during the config process and then told me the install had not finished and would I resume the install, only to bail out again...
My very first linux experience was a Suse live CD, more than 3 years ago, so it has a special meaning for me. But even with version 10.3 I still cannot think of one reason to even think of giving up my MEPIS installations for OpenSuse. Just hope it works for others.
54 • openSUSE 10.3 (by PP on 2007-10-08 16:41:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
I installed 10.3 (KDE) on my laptop, replacing openSUSE 10.1. After a few days of use, the biggest differences for my daily use are
PROs:
+ 1 cd install, finally!
+ Faster package management (a LOT faster)
+ Faster boot
+ Better access to community repos & restricted stuff
BUGS:
- My wireless driver (fsam7400) didn't compile anymore, but a hack was on found on forums that fixed it
- Touchpad settings (via Ksynaptic) are not saved, and I have to reconfigure the thing every time (still to be resolved)
CONCLUSION:
SUSE has addressed its old weaknesses (like package manager). Unless more weird bugs come up, I'm happy to conclude it's the best openSUSE ever, and by far.
55 • Re: 55 openSUSE 10.3 (by ned on 2007-10-08 16:46:00 GMT from Austria)
tried to have a look suse a few times over the last years, but it never would even install on my hardware - don't know why, it's standard business-type pc and laptop - debian had/has no problem there...
so i'm wondering about why so many people are ecstatic about it - what computers are they using??
56 • RE 55 : SuSe and ectasy (by dbrion on 2007-10-08 16:55:48 GMT from France)
"so i'm wondering about why so many people are ecstatic about it "
My colleague installed an older version of SuSe, with written instructions... She never fell into irrational fits, as she is always lucid, but it was enough for her professional needs.
I just had to swear her that, on her laptop , she should try to hit either the esc, F1 or F8 key to help her booting from the CD.... and that she would understand every menu... => Suse doesnot seem that beginners unfriendly... at least from earlier versions...
57 • Reviewing a Reviewer (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 16:58:05 GMT from Canada)
The latest release of Puppy shows users to have polar-opposite results
Hardly surprisng, but it's hoped a more rational view will be adopted.
If Mr Bodnar permits, (& DWW readers can stomache):
A recent Blog hosted by O'Reilly, was authored by Ms. C. Martin.
Titled "Why I Haven't Reviewed Puppy Linux"
Sad events 'spilling over' onto varied forums prompted this more moderate recant.
The gamut of emotions engendered indicate, it was time for a summation of events:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The simplist approach, (even of not a 'profesional") would have been for Ms Martin
to simply reply, in requests to review Puppy_
Puppy (every version ?) failed to boot on all except one computer in her present possession
That she did not was a sad error of discretion
To start the topic by quote:
- "The review would be so incredibly negative"
Then expand upon that by quotes:
"-P.S.: If someone out there can explain to me why making Puppy work would be worth the extra effort and time (with time in short supply right now) without resorting to flames"
> Seems deliberately inflamatory at best, leading to speculation of what is her personal objectives
By her own admission, it DID boot on one, & she never requested factualy proven reasons for her failures
Rather than limit collateral damages, she encouraged more ill-will
As verification - please note her quotes;
"Thank you for comments without flames. They have mostly reinforced my view that Puppy really isn't worth bothering with and is somewhat less than even half baked."
"I have long argued that we have too many half-baked Linux distributions"
"I do have the skills to make it work. OK, I might have to rebuild X and change the way the distro does hardware"
"Why should a professional (which I am, for the past 27 years by my calendar) have to_"
"Poor hardware support, at least on laptops"
( The reader is left > there is no doubt, that applies to ALL laptops)
"It works for me' > Is not a valid defense of Puppy if it doesn't work for other experienced Linux users".
The assertion is : (if it didn't) = It was "experienced users only" that failed in attempts"
> Puppy was off-handledly dissmissed (for her own criteria) = "Puppy is "useless")
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is contended, comparisions to others are not rationally discussing percieved flaws of the distribution of topic
To then knee-jerk. or castigate by launching immediate personal character attacks of those who dared to critique her behaviours :
Her quotes: "incoherent/flying_off_handle/coward/foaming at mouth" > is public slander, excceeding allowable legal freedom_of_expression standards
To publicly state unproven blanket accusations, Quote: "
"I see you haven't been reading my reviews or anything else I've written prior to now."
> Is to validly question: > Does she really wish to stand by that statement?
= Without verification, how can anyone know what others have or not read ?
Innumerable references are thrown in as "qualified retaliations", her unquestionable "Professional expertise"
Once again, the assumption on her part:
= All who disagree are not qualified to assess,& those that do dare to question, regardless of experience,
are not as skilled as she
Upon being queried ,she states " I(sic C.M) am not a "professional journalist"
This despite the proveable fact she has indeed been commissioned to write articles.
Articles which contain many grammatical errors, but never_the_less doesn't hinder her from casting aspersions
Subsequent vitriol on her part, of others Re use of English - (which have proven in extant, to be far more explicit than she has so far publicly demonstrated.)
When the more avid Puppy users posted - she blamed all on "the whole Puppy community"
Further adding fuel to fire by inferences (Re MarkSouth article) not publicly examined in detail to history nor veracity
= She was not involved in that episode - has not fully investigated, nor then is in any position to impartially
pass judgement to any degree of accuracy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ms Martin has now left a permanent stain on her record, it is a wonder that O'Reilly Mgt,
had not put an end to irrational behaviours - all reflect badly to acceptable media standards
I leave these thoughts for readers to ponder:
Perhaps all events are not surprising; Ms.Martin has branched out to international political media arena_
Is all no more than an unsavoury ploy to gain readership ?
She does seem to have adopted the motto expressed in the homily:
"There is no such thing as BAD publicity"
Perhaps the 'security field" has proven too demanding for her professional talents or attitudes, to be compatible
of long-term employment within a team environment.
In respect of her political juornalist focus.
The term "Takfiriyeen" is equally applicable to all who view outside threats in religious fervour.
"Mujahedeen" is a by-word, now indistinquishable to differentiate tactics employed by the more fanatical Mossad Zionist element
Dig it ?
58 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Reaction on 2007-10-08 17:10:53 GMT from United States)
Personally speaking, I've been a fan of SUSE for a long time. Have not yet tried 10.3 but will try later.
My view is that OpenSUSE is like a luxury car that uses lots of gas and maintenance is expensive. It has high-tech features and it is beautiful. But features and beauty will cost you resources.
59 • Suse 10.3 - why the bashing? (by bill on 2007-10-08 17:17:40 GMT from United States)
I guess it's sort of the anti-Ubuntu syndrome. To many people Ubuntu is the only distro that has any worth and is "Linux" (see all the Digg posts) and anything else is non-existant. Whereas Suse is bad because it's not Ubuntu (or whatever their distro of choice might be) or they dealt with MS or it's Novell or ..................
Personally I doubt any distro is perfect - hell, I loaded the latest Kubuntu and had nothing but problems getting it loaded and then the package system got corrupted and all I could do was reinstall it. My take on it was it was quick, not yet mature and lacked system management and recovery tools - more for a noobie.
60 • openSuSE 10.3 (by Dave on 2007-10-08 17:19:16 GMT from United States)
I have installed opensuse 10.3 on 4 different machines and had no problems at all.
The first machine is a Dell D820 Dual Core 2Ghz laptop with 2GB or RAM an NVIDIA Quatro graphics card and 1680x1050 resolution. All hardware was detected without a hitch.
Machine 2 is an Athlon64 3200+ with 2GB of RAM an NVIDIA FX5200 graphics card. This is a dual boot machine and all hardware and windows partitions were detected fine.
Machine 3 is a P4 2GHz machine with 512MB of RAM an NVIDIA FX5200 graphics card. Again, all hardware was detected fine.
Machine 4 is a AthlonX2 5600 with 2GB of RAM and NVIDIA 8800GTS graphics card all SATA drives. Once again, all hardware was detected fine and 10.3 sreams on this machine!
I have had zero problems installing or configuring software or hardware and have tried both KDE and GNOME and both work fine.
Just for the record, I also run Ubuntu 7.04 and PCLinuxOS 2007. If I am using GNOME I prefer Ubuntu if I am using KDE it opensuse all the way.
61 • Why not? (by Mark Wyatt on 2007-10-08 17:28:55 GMT from United Kingdom)
What I want to know is why there there aren't more localised versions of Linux. More specifically, at no point have I ever heard of a Klingon-localised Linux, and you would have thought that was an obvious thing to exist (Wouldn't you? Well really, wouldn't you??)
OTOH, if you are thinking of developing a Klingonised version of Linux (disclaimer: I currently claim no intellectual property rights over the name Klingix, though that might change. Well, apart from anything else Klingix sounds like toilet tissue, or something) be aware that you'll probably have to produce GnomeKlingix, KDEKlingix (or KKlingix, pronounced KuhKuhKuhKlingix for some reason), EnKlingix, XFCEKlingix, WidowMakerKlingix (which sounds like a typo, but isn't) and at least one of the *boxes which might be FluxBoxKlingIx or KlingBoxFluxIx.
There only remains the obvious need for a Bruce Lee themed Klingix as KungFuKlingix, KlingKungFuIx being too difficult to pronounce, and the plan for world domination is complete. Unless FuManChuGnomeKungFuKlingix gets there first, of course, which would be a problem.
62 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 17:38:45 GMT from United States)
Does anyone have any speed comparisons (even weak ones) for opensuse 10.3 vs. 10.2?
Previous versions were very heavy and slow on machines more than 6 months old, and included too many applications.
I prefer lighter distros, but am not averse to larger distros if they have something to offer.
63 • No subject (by Daniel on 2007-10-08 17:50:19 GMT from France)
Thanks Ladislav for another great DWW ! Just ordered Gutsy, and still testing the beta :). I'll try Puppy, good review.
Keep up the good work
64 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Ibrahim Yusof on 2007-10-08 17:53:11 GMT from Malaysia)
Installed 10.3 (KDE) on my ACER 5500Z laptop without any problem but it takes more than 4 hours. Font look ugly compare to 10.2 but manage to get 1024x800 resolution whereas only 1024x768 in 10.2.
Failed to install on my NEC desktop - unable to download repository data and update.
65 • Thanks for Puppy 3.0 Retro (by RichardS on 2007-10-08 17:53:16 GMT from United Kingdom)
I'm grateful for the release of Puppy 3.0 Retro (which uses the older 2.6.18.1 kernel). The "proper" version of Puppy 3.0 does not work in my VirtualBox 1.5 but the "retro" version works nicely - thanks.
There does seem to be a strange compatibility issue with some recent versions of the Linux kernel.
66 • re: 61 Why not? (by Tony on 2007-10-08 17:53:40 GMT from United States)
Funny Mark, but true? I googled and came across this Klingon clock that is suppose to be for Linux?
http://tlhaq.twobrotherssoftware.com/linux.php
Of course a Bruce Lee version of Linux could be Leenix?
67 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Ibrahim Yusof on 2007-10-08 17:58:42 GMT from Malaysia)
resolution 1280x800 not 1024x800 as mentioned in previous posting
68 • openSUSE 10.3 (by Eudoxus on 2007-10-08 18:00:59 GMT from Latvia)
Running openSuSE from the day it was released. It works quite well on my hardware (IBM ThinkPad R50 Celeron M). However I have some problems. Intel driver has some glitches, but I supposes it is not SuSE specific as I had the same problem on Debian Lenny. Suspend to RAM does not work. Network Manager sucks so I installed Kinternet (i use KDE)
If you want to have a nice and slim SuSE installation I should advice you to download one CD installation (either Gnome or KDE according to your preferences) and then install it without enabling SuSE repos because in that case you will not get all the bloat. While installing, uncheck AppArmour as most probably you will not need it. If you want your system to run faster, remove all beagle crap.
All in all I think this is definetly better release than 10.2. Now my SuSE boots and runs as fast as my Debian Etch.
69 • dualboot with WinXP (by Louw Pretorius on 2007-10-08 18:08:06 GMT from South Africa)
I installed SuSE 10.3 today from within winxp with dualboot and it was an absolute breeze. I was a little worried atfirst about what was going to happen partition-wise and how things will pan-out but it was like a walk in the park and my dualboot system is working very well indeed thank you.
My only suggestion/question is why don't suse 10.3 support my nvidia 7800 out-the-box??
70 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Robert on 2007-10-08 18:08:12 GMT from United States)
Package manager better, but still not as good as APT and Synaptic. Wireless still doesn't work after waking from hibernation. A bug that's at least a year old.
71 • 68 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 18:08:58 GMT from United States)
> Now my SuSE boots and runs as fast as my Debian Etch.
That's surprising, to say the least!
I posted 62 also and will give what you say a try at some point. I wish they had an installation document titled "openSUSE for the average user with average hardware".
72 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Robert on 2007-10-08 18:09:10 GMT from United States)
Not to mention that it still takes way too long to install. PCLOS, Mint, and so many others take 10-15 minutes to install on the same machine. I'm not impressed.
73 • Qu Slim SuSe install? (by dbrion on 2007-10-08 18:12:20 GMT from France)
Are there other ways of having a slim install than the choice of sources? For Mandrivas (even 2008.0 beta2 and RC[1-2]), one can choose the apps one wants (and their "upper" dependencies are automatically installed, too, and one can remove the apps which one feels useless. Is there the same mechanism in Suse (it is finer than switching from oneCD to x CDs/ DVDs?).
This is somewhat time consuming, but, if one doesnot want to distro-hop,(professional or (incl) comfortable use) what is the matter? (what is best/ fastest, taking a distr which takes 3 hrs to install and lasts 3 yrs, or twelve distrs which last 3 months and take half an hour to install?)
74 • openSUSE 10.3 Mini-review (by Mudcat on 2007-10-08 18:24:53 GMT from United States)
I installed openSUSE 10.3 to my Athlon 64 2800+ PC and Athlon XP 2800+ laptop, this weekend. I have also installed it to an Intellistation at work.
I originally tried upgrading two of the boxes and the upgrades failed miserably. Most likely this was a result of cobbling together "community repositories" to install specific software packages. So, after backing up each box, I did a full install. The laptop was only done as a full install, as it had previously been installed with PCLinuxOS 2007.
My experience: 10.3 is no more bloated than most full-featured distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva). I've installed it using both the GNOME CD and the full DVD. SUSE's install is still arguably the most cumbersome of any distribution. I didn't find that it took exceptionally long (not hours, as some report) to do it's work. But, it is certainly not as fast an install as Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS. After install, I liked SUSE's GNOME desktop environment better than Ubuntu or Mint (which, in turn, I like better than Fedora or Mandriva). It is my opinion that openSUSE presents the most professional looking and functioning desktop (even better than SLED) available in Linux today. And, I had fewer post-install setup issues than with any other distributions apart from PCLinuxOS and Mint. This is a good sign: I'm hoping some of the "mainstream" distributions start picking up on ease of use/configuration advantage found in some of the more community-oriented distributions (e.g., Mint, PCLinuxOS, and -- from what I've heard -- Mepis). Package management has gone from one of the worst to one of the best -- much faster than previous 10.x releases and now on a par with other full-featured distributions. Many packages are available by adding community repositories. Packages from the Build Service have been available for a while, but the process had been cumbersome and slow -- and definitely not friendly for new Linux users. Now, package management is a breeze -- especially with the new one-click feature. YaST has been cleaned up significantly, with more sensible descriptors and less pointless "wizards" (PCLinuxOS/Mandriva, please take note) and more straight configuration pages (a la, RH/Fedora and Ubuntu). Wireless worked flawlessly with both Ralink-based cards I tested.
My only issue was trying to get 3D working with my ATI 9600 card -- so, I could use Compiz/XGL as well as with the nVidia card on the Intellistation. Installing ATI drivers was a snap with the one-click installer. However, configuration was an entirely different matter. (I wish I would have copied my xorg.conf from the previous 10.2 install.) Still working to resolve this, as I write...
My previous experience with the 10.x series has been that SUSE is a bit buggier than most distributions -- although most of the bugs can be fixed/worked around with a little effort. However, I've also found that SUSE support for server hardware is generally superior to most of it's competitors. (I can't even get the last two Ubuntu releases to boot on several different servers at work.) This release seems substantially faster and less buggy than earlier versions. I will be looking forward to installable live disks -- as pioneered by Knoppix/Morphix, Mepis, MCNLive, and PCLinuxOS -- now available with many mainstream distributions.
Note: For those experiencing problems with SUSE, I highly recommend doing a media check prior to install. My first attempt at installation failed. I checked the media using functionality integrated into the SUSE installer (again, this is nothing special, these days -- many distributions have had this feature for a while) and found that the iso I had downloaded (via Bittorrent) was corrupt. One download and a successful media check later and I was happily installing openSUSE 10.3.
75 • openSUSE 10.3 (by Stephen Wilson on 2007-10-08 18:27:33 GMT from Canada)
Downloaded the one-CD GNOME version of openSUSE 10.3 and installed it this weekend. The fact that much of the system is downloaded during the install took me by surprise, but things went smoothly. The installer is quite sophisticated. For example, it gave me descriptions of my two ethernet boards from which to select that were actually identifiable by name. openSUSE chose to install to the available free space on my disk without telling me what it was doing, which was a little disconcerting, although harmless.
My overall impression was that it's a very professional-looking system. Some issues:
1. Although my Windows partition was seen, it was unusable because only one of the ntfs-3g files was installed. I had to download and install the rest of them manually to make the partition read/write.
2. My Ubuntu partition was not seen (although it was in GRUB. Again, I had to manually mount it in fstab.
3. A few things, like shutdown, did not work until I rebooted by manually shutting off the power button wgile openSUSE was running.
4. Desktop effects would not work out of the box. Although there is a nice dialogue to take you to somewhere to install software, it did not function. I had to find the nvidia drivers and install them, which was fairly easy, but not very intuitive.
5. I found openSUSE to be significantly slower to boot-up than Ubuntu.
Overall, I didn't see anything (except newer kernel and software) that made me feel it was any better than my Ubuntu install.
76 • Re: 57 • Reviewing a Reviewer (by Anonymous from Canada) (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 18:38:41 GMT from Malaysia)
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/11070_3701421_2
Mr. Byfield writes that Gentoo "quickly gained a reputation as a geek's distro, largely because it required all packages to be compiled for maximum optimization for each system. This process could take days to complete, and could mean many wasted hours if you made a mistake."
Mr. Byfield's use of the past tense suggests that this may no longer be true, but he does not state this in unambiguous terms (although he does mention that Gentoo "now features a Live CD and a graphical installer, while retaining a high degree of customization)." His comment is reminiscent of David Brickner's statement that "KDE, for example can take between 12 and 60 hours, depending upon the speed of your machine." (Linux Desktop Pocket Guide, 2005, O'Reilly Media)
Mr Byfield is apparently 'a computer journalist who writes regularly for Datamation, Linux.com, and Linux Journal'. He does not appear to have written for Distrowatch but may find the following comments by Distrowatch readers helpful if he happens to visit this forum:
1. Even if it takes 72 hors, does it that matter? (dbrion)
2. I don't remember exactly how long KDE took to install on both mine and my son's boxes since on both occasions it was installed overnight, and completed in the morning. So in both cases it was quite a bit less than over 72 hours. (Landor)
3. If determined to run Gentoo on old iron or without broadband ~
Use their BINARY sources ! (Anonymous)
77 • Linux Tmxxine Prism 3 Beta (by Lobster on 2007-10-08 18:53:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Linux Tmxxine Prism 3 BETA
a complete Puppy 3 compatible 428 MB Linux desktop distro
that runs very fast
Puppy 3 - improvements latest Puppy 3
Ezpup 3 - XP and Vista style themes with text to speech capacity
Firefox 2.0.0.7 default browser
Improved online programs support using Glint homepage
Experimental 'Vision' program introduced
Open Office 2.0.3 software Suite built in
Extra Graphics software - Xara LX, Gimp Shop, Scribus DTP, POVRay, Blender etc all built in
Web sfs (Java 1.5.0_11, Firefox 2.0.0.3, Thunderbird, Kompozer, Bluefish, TightVNC Server, Azureus)
DOWNLOAD
http://www.puppylinux.ca/lobster/
Details
http://tmxxine.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=LinuxTmxxine10
78 • openSUSE "bloat" and installation time? (by BitBurners.com on 2007-10-08 19:01:38 GMT from Finland)
I have installed openSUSE at least a dozen times and mostly to a very modest hardware. I just can't figure out the where these comments about "bloat" or huge installation times come from.
openSUSE 10.3 1CD KDE installs to a Thinkpad T41 in about 35 minutes if online repos are not used, and about 55-60 minutes if they are (2mbit ADSL over WLAN). Installing to a crappy old IBM X23 is not significantly slower, so if you are experiencing installation times of hours, then have a look at your installation environment.
Also a IBM X23 equipped with might 384mbs of RAM runs openSUSE quite nicely, very similar to Ubuntu -- with the exception of KDE being a bit more responsive than GNOME (applies to openSUSE GNOME edition as well). So where is the bloat?!
79 • SuSE installer (by Eudoxus on 2007-10-08 19:05:33 GMT from Latvia)
I personally find SuSE installer more comprehensible than many other installers I have tried so far. Mint/Ubuntu installer seems completely pointless to me as it gives me no control over what is being installed on my system. Not so with SuSE - here you can chose what to install. And I am quite surprised by some reports that it takes long time. As for me, I did not noticed any considerable difference between installing SuSE and Mint. It takes about 35 minutes or more on my hardware in both cases (provided that you are not updating yor system from the net at the same time).
80 • Re 57 - Puppy & Caitlyn Martin (by ShakaZ on 2007-10-08 19:11:34 GMT from Belgium)
I'm happy to see an objective review of Puppy linux after having had quite a busy week arguing with Caitlyn about her biased views & bad faith & other arrogant replies on her O'reilly blog. Any positive thing presented to her by puppy users was dismissed with lame pseudo-arguments or ignored as she fought to maintain her stupid assumptions and credibility.
Glad i'm not the only one who was appalled by her behaviour, and yet there is still a lot of questionable replies by her you could have added to this case.
This review also answered the only feature i was interested in to give puppy a bit more time & perhaps install it as quick-fix distro on my systems : the installation of slackware packages. I heard slapt-get would be available which would make things much simpler.
I would like to see another feature in coming versions of puppy... the ability to remove unnecessary package from the base system. At the moment the package manager still doesn't allow to remove the seamonkey browser for instance as i can't live without firefox and it's extensions and would rather claim that space back to load the system even faster.
I can't wait for the team to ditch the old package manager and have slapt-get handle everything.
81 • I am going to test it but... (by tek_heretik on 2007-10-08 19:12:17 GMT from Canada)
the fact that it is the developing ground for traitor Novell (the 'immunity' deal with Microsoft) still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I am just curious if it will actually work this time as I have had no luck with any version of SuSE since 9.1 on an older, now gone, machine. >:-/
82 • Suse / Novel (by ShakaZ on 2007-10-08 19:28:09 GMT from Belgium)
Suse is the only linux system i have ever bought, back in the days about 10 years ago... Since Novel took control with an even more agressie comercial touch, i've not installed any Suse system anymore, yet with the lauch of OpenSuse i still gave the livecd a run once in a while only to come back to my preferred debian or slackware based distros which had more of features i wanted and were less bloated. The M$ only put the final nail in the coffin.
The only positive thing i see from Novel at the moment is they're about to bury the ignominious SCO for good.
83 • localized modems (by Abu sahl on 2007-10-08 19:41:59 GMT from Jordan)
a) why should heavily localized modems (at least, I hope , for non French counties and for supra-minimal quality) be supported by Mandriva?
I have to mention that France Telecom has a lot of branches around the world . so the modems mentioned earlier are actually widely used around the world .
84 • Opensuse 10.3 (by Michael Dotson on 2007-10-08 19:43:32 GMT from United States)
Opensuse 10.3 is a step in the right direction, but still not completely there for out of the box experience. I tried installs on both my home system, a 2.5Ghz HP, and my work machine, a 1.8GZ Dell machine. The HP install(minus beagle and AppArmor) is fast, beautiful, and delightful to run. On the Dell at work it lasted one day simply because it cannot seem to get my officejet G55 printer to work consistantly. The printer is picked up, and installed automatically. Works once or twice, and then decides to skip work. The same printer works fine all the time on Mepis, PCLinuxOS, and Granular, so it has to be a SUSE problem. So, after two hours of trying to get the printer to stay on, I gave up and went back to PCLinuxOS. I will keep the HP system loaded with 10.3 for now to see how stable it is over time. Maybe Suse just dont like Dell?
85 • Re #57 (by roadie on 2007-10-08 19:48:35 GMT from Canada)
Really, why do you care?
Ms Martin seems to have it in for Puppy, that's not going to change, so why bother giving her more publicity?
I've tried previous Puppy's, could'nt really get into them, it was just the overall "feel" of it. I never had any problems booting any version, then again, I did'nt try it on really ancient hardware or laptops. But I don't really see the benefit of using really ancient hardware when faster stuff is fairly readily available.
I certainly don't understand why a "professional" such as Ms Caitlyn would want to use such hardware, then again I did'nt read all of her blog, it seemed rather one-sided and increasingly negative, so yeah, I have better things to do.
One point I noticed on Ms Caitlyn's blog ( I believe it's locked now) was a reference to Barry Kauler changing the init scripts for 3.0 because he acknowledges a problem with them. That was not the impression I got from reading about the 3.0 release, rather that he found a way to make it boot faster, configuration, etc: Maybe I'm mistaken.
I am however going to try Puppy 3.0, it being more friendly to Slackware packages can't hurt.
I do think the review here on DW of Puppy 3.0 by Susan Linton was much more professional then the previous one, yes the background still sucks but at least info is included in the article on getting better ones.
No distro is for everyone, never will be, the present flaming and one-sided reviews are a by product of people with problems, not distro's. Use what works and be happy.
roadie
86 • Klingon Linux? (by farkwell on 2007-10-08 19:51:55 GMT from United States)
@61 • Why not? (by Mark Wyatt) " wrote: More specifically, at no point have I ever heard of a Klingon-localised Linux"
I believe that someone started a Ferengi localized Linux distro. The project was dropped because the GPL is not compatible with the Rules of Acquisition.
Rule 11. Even if it's free, you can always buy it cheaper.
Rule 13. Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
87 • Suse 10.3 fitting into my programming world (by Bill Savoie on 2007-10-08 20:08:07 GMT from United States)
I like the new SuSE 10.3 but I can't seem to get vim to do 'syntax on' highlight of my code. I have no problems with other distro's doing syntax highlighting. I also have trouble with the new design of fstab, not being able to mount windows partitions. I had to add symbolic links to get gcc-ada-4.2 to compile. It seems that gcc-4.2 and gcc-4.1 both have versions of Ada, but the code does not like extensions. I used the symbolic links to map the 4.2 to the name without the number. Still I like SuSE
88 • long SuSE install (by jeff_s on 2007-10-08 20:13:53 GMT from United States)
Well, I'm in the process of installing the single disc Gnome version of openSuse 10.3.
I did the 700 meg download, and ran the installation. But now it's downloading all the software. The install has been going for 1/2 hour, and says it has 1 hour 52 minutes remaining. Wow.
This seems odd beyond reason. Why do a full 700 meg download, when the installation routine turns around and downloads all the software it needs? If it's going to download the software it needs, why not make it a minimal install CD (like 100-150 meg download), including only what it needs to run the install?
Does the openSuSE single CD not have compression?
This is stupid beyond reason. Considering I can install the likes of Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mint, Mepis, sidux, etc in anywhere from 7 minutes to 15 minutes, with all the stuff needed for a slick and professional desktop, compared with doing a 700meg download then a multi hour install (where it downloads the software it needs), and take 2-1/2 hours to do it, to install openSusE, seems ridiculous, and rather pathetic.
I'll be patient and wait it out, and play with openSuse when it's done. But so far, I'm extremely unimpressed.
On second thought, I'm aborting. I just decided that if the Novell devs are going to waste this much of my time doing the initial install of their product, their product isn't worth the bother.
Really, single CD download, run live before install, fast, easy installation, perfect or near perfect hd detection, distros are a plenty. There is no reason to put up with anything less, particularly since it's all open source and they can all use each other's stuff (and stand on the shoulders of giants). Why Novell (or Red Hat, for that matter), can't do all that stuff, is beyond me. Pathetic and lame.
89 • still installing (by jeff_s on 2007-10-08 20:17:21 GMT from United States)
I didn't really abort the openSuse install. I was just appalled that it was taking so long.
I'm being patient. It might be worth it. I hope so.
The install is now going more quickly, because it finished it's needed download, and it's finally writing to disc, and the remaining time is going down instead of up.
Nonetheless, this is definitely something Novell needs to improve on. At least they finally released their distro as single CD downloads.
90 • EOF (post # 85) (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 20:27:44 GMT from Canada)
HI Roadie -
Not even being a Puppy user (3 versions did boot& work as intended)
~ other than to assess if their 'Live-mode' approach was suitable to my own
vague thougts RE mastering of a small portable Linux_
It did subsequently prove useful (it was close @ hand out of several options) to trouble-shoot whether,
it was an O/Sys, hardware or ISP problem > when suddenly& recently, WEB access.was lost.
Turned out to be a 9-Yr old router.
After replacing it, next week lost WEB again - this time, it was the ISP down !
In both cases, a liveCD can be run _virgin mode w/ no pre-Cfg'd gateway (resolve DNS) to confuse issues
A user can more readily start/stop dhcp daemon, reset all resources normally preset @ install)
So, in most circumstances - I would not bother to refute ignorance
In her case, it culminated other disparaging Linux insults
Besides, it serves notice - if she wishes to continue in her vanities - Esp. RE published political rantings :
There WILL be hell to pay, (not from me) = who needs yet more terrorist 'justifications" to worry about ?
There truly is such a thing as being "DEAD right" !
Fair enough ?
91 • re 88 & 89 (by Eudoxus at 2007-10-08 20:30:25 GMT from Latvia)
SuSE does have minimal install. You just should not enable repositiries at the very beginning of installation to avoid downloading and installing all that bloat. Install just from CD (without repos enabled) and then at the end just update it. And that's it. It's not perfect but still far from "pathetic and lame".
92 • Re: long SuSE install (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 20:32:18 GMT from Germany)
> I did the 700 meg download, and ran the installation. But now it's downloading all the software.
You should read "Some openSUSE 10.3 Misconceptions": http://kdedevelopers.org/node/3019
93 • SuseLinux 10.3 (by robzilla on 2007-10-08 20:33:53 GMT from United States)
I just installed Suse Linux 10.3 and my overall impression is speed. The system boots much faster and apps open faster. I am impressed with many of the features people have talked about already so I won't re-hash here.
One problem I have in 10.3 that I did not have in 10.2 is sound? Go figure. I have a Toshiba laptop with an intel/realtek audio card. I went to configure the volume and nothing is even listed. It is very odd. I have not heard anyone else with this problem. I am hoping they will fix it or I will find a solution in a forum soon.
The speed and responsiveness of the distro are impressive. If I can get sound working I may keep it but then again Ubuntu is coming out soon and I want to try it. I generally prefer Debian based or slack based distros.
As for the politics behind deals with MS I think Novell was worried about their enterprise customers. I do not think their decision was wise but I can't blame them for reacting out of fear. I would have preferred they take a stand and in the end I am not sure what protection, if any the deal with M$ will provide. I know as far as M$ is concerned anything that is not server 2003 windows or soon to be released 08 is an enemy. With the fact of Linux domination in the server market and the release of Vista on the desktop I am sure MS is getting ready to play dirty against Linux!
Robzilla
94 • About openSUSE install time (by linbetwin on 2007-10-08 20:37:05 GMT from Romania)
Don't forget that openSUSE does not come on a LiveCD/DVD. Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS install much faster because they just copy and decompress the filesystem on the CD to the HDD, but installing Ubuntu from the "alternate CD" takes longer than from the "desktop CD".
95 • Puppy (by Adrian on 2007-10-08 20:38:50 GMT from Romania)
I tested most of the Top ...20 distros in here. For very portable use, I mean from a USB stick, Puppy is the best I think. It works on every computer. Recognises all the standard hardware (WLAN modules, correct graphics - resolution etc.). It`s the fastest around. You can easily save everithing on the USB flash memory. But, it misses a nice window manager like KDE, XFCE or GNOME. For example Nimblex managed to include a good KDE in a 100MB distro including GIMP and other nice stuff, but Nimblex (the 100MB version) has little package collection at the moment and does not see my WLAN cards :(.
96 • Adden-dumbs (to # 90) (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 20:46:57 GMT from Canada)
I may add, in the 1st incident, time was lost because the ISP representative (incorrecty)
> advised their service was down.
In the 2nd, the modem stopped searching & LCD light stayed on, indicating the connection had been stably establshed.
All other cases of no access, the modem will search for a signal, all LCD lights continue blinking
To recable connections for direct (no router) necessitates a re-boot and re-Cfg of inet settings
> Always many ways to trouble-shoot ~ picking the most logical first, is universal to all problem solving
97 • Obsessive Puppies (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 20:47:05 GMT from United States)
You know I read Caitlyn Martin's blog entry and the comments. I didn't see her having it in for Puppy at all. She said she's tried version after version and that it doesn't boot up properly on any of her laptops. She wasn't willing to invest a lot of time trying to make it go because she didn't see what Puppy offered that other small distros didn't.
Did Caitlyn get increasingly negative? Sure. Not about the distro. She downloaded 3.00 and says she'll try it. Not immediately on demand. Puppy isn't the center of her life. What she got negative about were attack post after attack post by the Puppies who had nothing better to do. She wrote that she closed the thread after a comment attacking her was posted over and over again after she deleted it something like a dozen times. I'd get pretty pissed off if I were her too.
She hasn't posted here in the comments yet some Puppies are so obsessed with the fact that she said something not so nice about their precious little distro that they feel they have to attack her all over again. It seems to me her using the word "fanatic" is mild.
Caitlyn's reputation is stained? Not where I sit. The Puppies who attacked her here are the ones that look like idiots to me.
98 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Adrian on 2007-10-08 20:47:35 GMT from Romania)
I installed 10.3 from CD (700MB x86 version). Almost 2 hours on a Core Duo 512MB laptop? (including 300 packages downloaded @ 1 hour). It is the first time, that a distro after install, does not show me in Grub the Windows boot option (i`m using MS Win XP also). I was disapointed, so i installed other distros to have Windows at boot. For example the beautiful Dreamlinux takes max. 20 mins install, and Ubuntu 7.10 beta about 40 mins.
99 • #90: Death threats? (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 20:50:24 GMT from United States)
Now the Puppies are issuing death threats against Ms. Martin. I've e-mailed her. Ladislaw, I hope you're recording IP addresses. It seems to me she may need them for law enforcement.
100 • 10.3 One click install? (by Michael Dotson on 2007-10-08 21:05:09 GMT from United States)
Did I miss something in 10.3? What is this one click install I have seen mentioned several times in the post? Looked all over in my install and see no mention of it. Can someone enlighten me!
101 • Re: #100 1-Click install (by linbetwin on 2007-10-08 21:12:23 GMT from Romania)
I went to the openSUSE wiki to find out how to install compiz-fusion and it said "click this icon", I clicked and Firefox downloaded a script (GUI wizard) that installed compiz-fusion for me. It's not really just one click, but it's dead simple.
102 • Mandriva 2008.0 is nigh (by linbetwin on 2007-10-08 21:19:20 GMT from Romania)
The MDV 2008.0 installation tree is now available on the mirrors. Shouldn't be too long before ISO's will be publicly available! :)
103 • RE 97 & 99 (by ShakaZ on 2007-10-08 21:21:58 GMT from Belgium)
@AC 97 : last time i read she said she now had a "real reason" to avoid Puppy like the plague... at least that part of her blog was sincere & sums up the whole issue pretty well...
@AC 99 : Come on Caitlyn don't be afraid to show your real face... good luck getting in an ip from Ladislav... you can have mine for free if you ask it nicely ^^
104 • MORE " inability to impartially assess" by poster #99 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 21:29:22 GMT from Canada)
I was expressing legitimate concerns:
Terrorists seize upon any excuse to commit atrocities >
Why feed them ?
BTW false accusations such as yours - ARE both libelous & accountable
105 • Caitlyn Martin (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 21:30:34 GMT from United States)
I'm really tired of the whining about CM's lack of interest in reviewing Puppy. What is wrong with some of you? This nonsense is ridiculous and old. Give it a rest. You guys are almost to the point of stalking her.
106 • @ post 91 - Exodus (by jeff_s on 2007-10-08 21:36:13 GMT from United States)
I now see that on the left hand side. I assumed that it was required, so I accepted the defaults. I wish I didn't rush through that step, and not enabled the online repos. That would have save a huge amount of time (over an hour of downloading stuff).
But maybe there is a silver lining to this cloud - the packages coming from the online repos, one would assume, are up to date. So this might be saving me time on doing post install updates. I hope this is the case.
Anyway, it's been two hours now, and it's finally looking like it's nearing the end. Can't wait to start playing with openSuse. I hope the end result makes the very long install worth the wait.
107 • Re: #93 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 21:41:03 GMT from United States)
I just installed Suse Linux 10.3 and my overall impression is speed........The speed and responsiveness of the distro are impressive.
Wow! Do you own a Cray or something?
Or was your previous operating system Windows Vista?
108 • more on openSuse "long" install ... (by jeff_s on 2007-10-08 21:48:23 GMT from United States)
My openSuse install is still downloading/installing. But while I was waiting, I came across this on my other PC in my office:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3019
It explains how if you put a check mark next to the "Enable online repos" option, it will go above and beyond the packages on the CD, and download a whole lot of extra stuff. So basically, by enabling the online repos, I'm getting a DVD installation.
So that explains a lot, and my previous comment about "pathetic and lame" was premature.
That said, the section where you can enable the online repo (which is checked by default), should have been more clear (or maybe it was, and in my rush I didn't read it carefully).
Or perhaps it should be disabled by default, and enabling it will pop up a message saying something like "enabling this feature will cause the installation to download an additional 600+ megs of packages, and cause the installation to take substantially longer".
That way, it would be crystal clear to the end user, and they can easily choose which route to go -
fast with basic desktop from CD, or
(much) longer with tons of extra goodies from online repos.
109 • suse10.3 (by arno911 on 2007-10-08 21:58:11 GMT from Germany)
maybe it was because of the GM Version I used...
i had the same issues as cevo #53 reported in vbox.
tried to install it and failed miserably 3 times.
first thing i stumbled upon was the huge install. default packageselection takes 2.3Gb and this could not be fitted on the 700Mb CD, the download took forever.
no such problems with absolute, nimblex_sub100, grml, sidux and winxp in the very same vbox, so i think its suse who's to blame^^
all in all not a good experience.
someday, suse will be able to compete with debian.
but:
thats when slackware42 is out;)
110 • opensuse (by Sam Exner on 2007-10-08 22:22:40 GMT from United States)
I love opensuse! It detected all of my hardware, just as 10, 10.1, and 10.2 did. Other people who have tried it have said that it did not detect all of their hardware. I guess people should just use what works for them.
111 • opensuse 10.3 (by dj on 2007-10-08 22:33:48 GMT from United States)
Positive experience reported here installing and using an AMD 64 version with both KDE and Gnome. Much faster boot time than 10.2. Beautiful GUI. I use Debian Lenny as my primary distribution.
112 • Happy days (& versions ?) Post #110 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 22:55:26 GMT from Canada)
I can appreciate that sentiment !
It seems - no matter how careful we are, no two installs, even of the same version & on same hardware -
(Even those not @ first detected), ever are the exact same ?
But then, i used your good advice long ago, stuck w/one O/Sys, have seldom regretted it.
Besides, I finally heeded the saying
"Aritificlal intelligence is no match for natural stupidity"
= Gets too embarassing, risking then @!!## proving it
When temptations get strong, I use that as further excuse to avoid $pending -
To "upgrade" to a 64-bit, dual-core: Which means new M/Brd, RAM. SATA H/Drv., etc.
113 • OpenSuse 10.3 (by Paul on 2007-10-08 23:18:44 GMT from United States)
Installed the DVD (4.1GB) as a guest in VMware Wkstation 6.01 on both Suse 10.0 and Windows Vista hosts. I was surprised to run into install problems on both hosts (at the Hardware configuration step -- "poof" -- a solid, stable, frozen black screen with leeetle cursor in upper left corner). Whatever. Three-finger salute the dang thing, and do it the hard way.
I'm a wool-dyed Suse buyer since the days of 7.2., and I still remain faithful in spite of what 10.2 did to me. Virtualization is one of the easiest things to test with, and I presume Novell did so and the results didn't matter them.
114 • The new Puppy 3.0 desktop (by Paul Yearwood on 2007-10-08 23:40:23 GMT from United States)
Once you set up some kind of file saving method for Puppy on your system, (I'm trying the save to CD option as i have limited space on my 9 y/o compaq), the second time you boot the desktop is free of the welcoming screen. It is only displayed on first bootup or if you select the option "load to ram, ignore saved session". I've used Puppy since 2.14 and like the simplicity of the distro. It will also read and write to Windows' file systems and makes a great rescue system. I find it easy to use. Since the entire distro loads into ram, it runs as fast on my 400 Mhz PII with 256 ram as my, now dead, 1.6 Ghz Semperon with 512 ram. My installed OSs are a dual boot W.98 with Ubuntu 7.04. The only down side to using any Linux on this old box is that no distro picks up the onboard sound system or the old ISA Sound Blaster Vibra I installed. W98 does, so I'm now researching how to make it work. That will keep a semi-retired coot out of the girlie bars.
115 • Multiples (lol) (by Landor at 2007-10-09 00:21:26 GMT from Canada)
RE: 99
I was going to make a comment, but your "perception" of the comment is so utterly flawed how could I even begin to explain the intent of the person posting.
RE: 109
"someday, suse will be able to compete with debian.
but:
thats when slackware42 is out;)"
Or until the Debian collective decides to release their next stable, about the same time as Slacky's 42 :) (tongue in cheeck of course)
RE: 114
"That will keep a semi-retired coot out of the girlie bars."
Come to Canada and our girlie bars will make sure that a puppy doesn't distract you from a kitty :)
Now to a general comment :)
I'm going to take Puppy 3.0 for a, (what's the correct term since they like these references?) walk? I'll put my blinders when looking at all the shortcuts on the desktop until they're deleted. I'm sure I'll be able to play with the Puppy for a bit once those Fleas? are gone. :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
116 • Re 61 & 86 (by Soloact on 2007-10-09 00:40:54 GMT from United States)
Don't forget, once you start with Klingex and Ferengix, all of the others will want their own, too. Romulinux, Dominionix, Tholianix, etc, etc. Even Borgix! But I think Borgix would assimilate all of the other Linux Distros, and we'd all end up using Borgix. Resistance is futile!
117 • Susan Linton: Your review (by Landor on 2007-10-09 00:58:42 GMT from Canada)
I thought this was a great review and you summed it up in a manner that I truly appreciated, even if I'm not a Puppy follower. It shows true professionalism in a review:
"It may not be the prettiest at the party, but it has a great personality."
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
118 • openSuse 10.3 downloads from Bigpond server (by Observer on 2007-10-09 01:13:19 GMT from Australia)
[Bigpond is Australia's largets ISP (20-35%?) and provides a free
(metered - non-chargeable) download server to its Cable and ADSL subscribers.]
openSUSE-10.3-GM-KDE-x86_64.iso (dnloads=3)
http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=download&id=31191
openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-x86_64.iso (dnloads=119)
http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=download&id=31181
openSUSE-10.3-GM-GNOME-i386.iso (dnloads=39)
http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=download&id=31180
openSUSE-10.3-GM-KDE-i386.iso (dnloads=14)
http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=download&id=31188
openSUSE-10.3-GM-Addon-NonOss-BiArch.iso (dnloads=31)
http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=download&id=31179
openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-i386.iso (dnloads=232)
http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=download&id=31176
NB: openSUSE 10.3 scores 400+ downloads in 3-4 days whilst the
"DW No 1", ranked by highest number of unique ip daily (i.e. each ip
counted only once per day) visits to DW OS page, managed only half that
number in 4 months. In same time frame as PCL, Fedora scored 2000+ and
the Ubuntu family 5000+ downloads.
:-)
119 • openSUSE 10.3 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-10-09 01:39:52 GMT from Italy)
Indeed, I do believe openSUSE 10.3 is one of the best releases ever.
It is the worthy successor to another great one: SUSE 9.0
I recommend you use the 32 bit version, even if you have a 64 bit capable processor.
120 • Mandriva / modems (by werner at 2007-10-09 01:40:43 GMT from France)
Just this is the general problem why Linux goes forwards so slowly, because programmers defend whats not working rather than make it easily working ...
Why to support the french modems ?? Because people in France want to use internet too !
Several times I tried to install for other people Mandriva, this always failed and after days trying still without success (installing by hand the firmware, ueagle etc) I had to remove it and install Slackware, because the people became tired and wanted to use internet. Because of this it's that it would be good to support these modems also in Mandriva, who want that this distro is led serious and is used.
Beside of the two mentioned modems have still another, i think the name beginning with Z, what has only USB (not eth), worser even These things, Mandriva should support
121 • Suse 10.3 Beta (by Roger Pierson Jr on 2007-10-09 01:56:41 GMT from Spain)
I have been an avid user of Linux since 1998. BUT I always had to fall back on MS Win products ( or OS/2 ) for compatibility / productivity issues. Well I fell in love with Mandrake ( now Mandriva ) with version 8.3. I was building computers for paying users and friends , and found Linux far more usable, as well as stable. I have a soft spot for Mandriva, but Novell's efforts with Suse 10+ ( now 10.3 before 10.0) are OUTSTANDING, so I switched! Everything just worked. I love pushing things to see how they function under stress. Suse 10.3 is thus far, ideal. Packages not included on installation, ( not many ) can be easily fouond, and the OS just installs them. I can utilize graphic cards my now customers CAN'T use with Vista with Suze 10.3. As well as the other version ( 10.0-10.2 ).
You really can't say much more than this , It downloads, installs, and then gets out of the way. Lets me do my work. FULL productivity suites. Multimedia. TV. DVD reader / writer.Graphic / image editor with GImp. There is even a Vector based drawer with Skensil.
122 • Mandriva (by werner at 2007-10-09 02:11:58 GMT from France)
On the side of Slackware, during years I used Mandriva, and installed it on other person's computers. In the time of version 9 ... 10.2 it was good, principally for Linux beginners. For serious work not so much, because it is simply slow !!!
After 10.2 it falled in decadence. Things becoming slow, not more working, new hardware wasnt longer supported. A child of Mandrake becoming better: ALTLinux. I deleted that and used this.
In the meantime, also RedHat/Fedora crashed. When came v. 7 I deleted it too, because even #mc and other basical progs didnt come more. Other distros which adopted the .rpm sistem, crashed too (Peanut Linux, SuSE, VideoLinux); at the end #rpm itself was abandoned.
We will see in what direction this group of distros will go ...
123 • popup the truth (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 02:15:24 GMT from Australia)
Here is a simple way to get better accuracy in DW Stats. When people select a distro page they get a popup with options like this:
DW Stats: your distro visit is for:
* general info, I am not currently a user of this distro
* general info, I am currently a user of this distro
* info so that I can obtain and use this distro
After they make a selection they can then go to the page – or you can add the selections to the page itself and not have a popup. If the options are unselected it could default to general info, not a user. This will finally get more accuracy in DW Stats to settle controversies like the PCLOS one. You will see exactly who is downloading/purchasing distros or who is already using them.
Of course, you could also add some other options as you like, for example:
* I am a chronic distrohopper and need help
* I am a distro fanboi wanting to mess up DW Stats.
124 • 90: [There truly is such a thing as being "DEAD right" !] (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 02:16:07 GMT from Malaysia)
Perhaps Ladislav should sticky post #90 as a guide for future reviewers of Puppy Linux.
I think Ms. Martyn would have been more circumspect if she had visited http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070625&mode=43 before posting her 'non-review'.
On the other hand, some reviewers may not be moved by the sort of gentle criticism that is usually found in the Distrowatch Comments. Bruce Byfield writes:
"Insults about my work rarely disturb me. If they're not illiterate, I can almost always count on them to misunderstand what I said or show signs of having an agenda that has nothing to do with the qulity of what I've written or the issues arising from it.
"Most of the time, too, they're anonymous, which always seems less than courageous when you're abusing someone . By contrast, people who have read what I have to say and feel moved to explain why they disagree with me usually sign their names."
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield/abuse.pdf
125 • opensuse-10.3 (by Rajesh G on 2007-10-09 02:42:57 GMT from India)
I have been using Suse since it 6.3 version, and now latest 10.3 since its release. It is just great! Yast and Suse's kde are real pleasure to use! With yast, you can control almost every part of your system, graphically! Kde is very pleasing and easy to use - unfortunately, I understand all development (OO.o, etc) are more GTK based now a days. I am not sure what future will hold to kde. But, latest suse's gnome is workable, has come a long way. Only thing I miss is that I could not install Adobe Reader 8.1-1 in latest suse! :-(
Heartiest wishes & thanks to suse developers (incl. of course, Novell! ;-) )
126 • #123 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 02:54:16 GMT from United States)
Another needed selection:
* I'm just messing with the obsessive-compulsive guy that dreamed this up as he whined about how Distrowatch rankings mean nothing, but was unable to put them out of his mind, even as he typed out the childish spelling of fanboi for the gazillionth time.
127 • Bravo, ShakaZ, for standing up to CM's [no appropriate word here] (by Bravo on 2007-10-09 03:06:34 GMT from Philippines)
Re #103 (also #57, #80, #85) - I sympathize with you ShakaZ, for having gone through a week of [**?**] at oreillynet's Caitlyn non-review article. Why, Ms Caitlyn even counts two identical laptops (except RAM size) as two different test machines!
Bravo, oreillynet.com, for hosting a very "nice", "objective" and "professional" person in Ms Caitlyn.
Perhaps Ms Caitlyn should stop writing (er, non-writing) about Linux?
128 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 03:27:23 GMT from United States)
After seeing the comments from the nutjob Puppy Linux fans, I assure you, I will never consider using it. Heck, I won't even go to the Puppy website. They'd probably record my IP address and track me down and force me at gunpoint to install it on all my computers. I've never seen anything more childish on Slashdot or Digg.
Is there a leader of the Puppy community who will stand up and renounce their actions? Or does the leadership of the community agree with them?
129 • SuSE live cd's Yes, they do exist (by ee_eff on 2007-10-09 03:32:07 GMT from United States)
A little nosing around on a couple of the SuSE ftp sites, and I found a couple of un-documented live cd’s, one for gnome and one for KDE. The gnome worked great on my laptop but refused to boot on a friends. There was a directory that appearred–indicating that this was RC2 for 10.3–but there was only one RC for 10.3, so naturally I had to take a peek!
http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/suse-live-cds-yes-they-do-exist/
130 • Open SuSE 10.3 RC1 (by ee_eff on 2007-10-09 03:39:11 GMT from United States)
I installed openSuSE RC1 (I couldn't wait) and it is wroking beautifully. I am not sure I will upgrade to 10.3 GM because everything just-works!
SuSE deserves a big thanks. I have been using SuSE since %.2 and it has consistently always gotten better with each release, although they should bring back the function plots on their packaging, and continue to write SuSE with a small u, of course.
ef
131 • No subject (by Trobin on 2007-10-09 03:39:29 GMT from Canada)
Re #90
Don't know who yor #90 don't care to know either. However if you thought you were ding Puppy a favour your sadly mistaken, and as a result of your post, at least one person has decided not to bother trying Puppy Linux. Not because of the distro itself, but because of the quality of some of it supporters.
Re #104
Terrorists? Atrocities? All she did was give an opinion. If your nose is out of joint that is your problem not hers.
Caitlyn, on behalf of the Puppy Linux Community, for as much as I can spaek for them, I would like to apologize for the comments made. I do not believe that they represent the sentiments of the vast majority of Puppy Linux Users.
132 • RE: BY THE POWERRRRR of BLOGGGGGG or 128 (by Landor on 2007-10-09 03:42:20 GMT from Canada)
"Heck, I won't even go to the Puppy website. They'd probably record my IP address and track me down and force me at gunpoint to install it on all my computers. I've never seen anything more childish on Slashdot or Digg."
Curious you finished up your comment with that no?
Again a new first. I love coming here, my beliefs of having seen it all are constantly revised. First we have distro specific zealots, now ones from blogs.
What next, mailing lists?
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
133 • OpenSUSE 10.3 (by Danny Hensel on 2007-10-09 03:54:21 GMT from United States)
I downloaded and installed this distro the day it was released, and I was fully reminded of why I switched from OpenSUSE 10.2 to Ubuntu 7.04 earlier this year. Not much has changed with the installation process, which is still overly lengthy. YaST was definitely improved, but it wasn't bug-free and I had some configuration problems that I couldn't fix with it that I should have been able to. I never managed to get Compiz to work on it either, which has become a big selling point for me since I first started using Beryl with OpenSUSE 10.2. After going though two lengthy re-installations due to bugs or other configuration problems when trying to get everything to work, I gave up and downloaded and installed Ubuntu 7.10 beta (which is what I am currently using) which isn't entirely bug free either, which is understandable since it's only a beta version, but has been much more cooperative and much quicker to reinstall if the need arises.
134 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 04:05:05 GMT from Australia)
http://en.opensuse.org/Mirrors_Released_Version
1The Addon CD contains packages with closed source or not OSI-compliant license.
2The Addon-Lang CD contains translations into additional languages.
3The DVD contains the packages of the 5 CDs and the Addon CD. The retail DVD being a double-layer contains more packages.
4The Start-CD image is required for a network or internet installation. It only contains the installer, all packages have to be downloaded from the Internet or must be offered in the local network.
http://en.opensuse.org/Mirrors_Released_Version
----------
Installation
Contents
* 1 Basic Installation
* 2 Advanced Installation Options
o 2.1 Different Architectures
o 2.2 Tips and Tricks
* 3 Non-official versions of openSUSE
http://en.opensuse.org/Installation
135 • openSUSE 10.3 Documentation (links) (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 04:09:34 GMT from Australia)
It pays to read before you install any OS!
http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse103/opensuse103_startup/data/book_opensuse_startup.html
http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse103/opensuse103_reference/data/book_opensuse_reference.html
http://www.suse.com/relnotes/i386/openSUSE/10.3/RELEASE-NOTES.en.html
136 • RE: # 125 (by Anonymous Penguin on 2007-10-09 04:11:51 GMT from Italy)
"Only thing I miss is that I could not install Adobe Reader 8.1-1 in latest suse! :-( "
And why not? Just remove the existing one, download 8.1.1 from the Adobe site and install it :)
137 • Some openSUSE 10.3 Misconceptions (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 04:17:09 GMT from Australia)
KDE Developer's Journals
Some openSUSE 10.3 Misconceptions
Submitted by beineri on Mon, 10/08/2007- Distributions
There are some misconceptions floating around about openSUSE 10.3. Unfortunately uninformed people are still allowed to blog Eye-wink so let me pick up some I read:
"No Live-CD! Every hobby distro has one. Why can't a huge company like Novell do one?"
Obviously someone didn't follow the development and also didn't read the release announcement. To quote from there: "Live CDs will be released in the next couple of weeks." A bug with CD-drives led to the decision to not release it last Thursday, currently I would bet on later this week. The KDE/GNOME Live-CDs contain btw the same packages as the one CD install media.
"Other distro installer require X clicks, for YaST you need XX clicks"
The YaST of the install media empowers you as usual to control every aspect of your installation - if you want. If you have no special needs clicking "Next" at every step will also lead you quickly to the goal. But openSUSE 10.3 will also premiere a Live-Installer on above mentioned Live-CDs which allows to install a system with the most common setting with much less steps (read X clicks) like known from other popular Live-CD distros.
"With the one CD media the install downloads over 600MB. Didn't they manage to put it all on CD?"
[...]
"openSUSE is bloated"
This couldn't be further away from truth. openSUSE 10.3 has actually the most lean footprint of all recent releases. All patterns have been reworked and packages more splitted, eg you can install a very small base system or basic X window. The desktop CD installations are coercively optimized for size. You can call a full DVD or CD+online repos installation bloated but then you opted for the wide range of applications option.
http://kdedevelopers.org/blog/457
138 • Here kttty kitty -ouch - what claws ! (Past post #115 etal)_ (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 04:30:38 GMT from Canada)
To use or not any distribution, based on any opinion - Esp. when the reviewer or site
takes great pains to repetitively stress they are an "expert"
> Hence not to be questioned on impartiality _
IMNSHO - Would be to sell yourself short, perhaps then miss the one_of_the_few that do fill most of your own desires ?
How can one hasty reactionary comment ('I wouldn't use') - harm any distro ?
Contrary to MarkSouth's feelings - the unpleasantries he DID suffer
(escalated when proof was publicly disclosed )
After that the 'handwriting_was_on_the_wall'
All, much ado over nothing !
Then an inveterate heel-biter got the best of me - I retaliated.
Am I proud - of course not
Should that influence any O/System choice = WHY !
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post # 115
Kitty or "beaver" - not only the Canadian symbol, but "universally' known ( well, to some anyway i've been told)
I was once in_a_former_life, in the only hotel in a small town
The primary resources were logging & some fishing.
As the job demands meant I again had missed dinner, & the one other cafe already closed;
My only chance for food was- a stale sandwich & of course, beer in their 'pub'
In that realm, pubs on weekend are full of - types that, it's not wise to offend
But it was mid-week, the watering hole almost deserted
Settling in at a dark table, w/back against wall (just in case)
I gagged down the snack, and sipped my beer.
Round-about 15 or 20 minutes later, still on same beer_
(I had to get up VERY early) the doors burst open, & in waltzed a group of 'young ladies'
Didn't take long, to realize it was the equivalent of a stag party
Well hells' bells - I can swear- (if not drink) w/the best of loggers, but those whaooa_up_fella > "ladies" !
My ears burned as I snuck out - (never did finish the beer).
Whether I would have been greeted w/open arms - or closed fist
I clearly couldn't was out-gunned, incapable of handling either outcome !
Moral - be very careful of where & what you say - just_in_case !
139 • The heads of distro fanatics are "BLOATED" with (by Prejudice on 2007-10-09 04:30:51 GMT from Australia)
...rather than openSUSE , IMHO! And that, sadly, is to be expected in a place like DWW comments section.
Observer
140 • Puppy recruitment suggestion declined (by Lobster on 2007-10-09 04:33:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
===========
Heck, I won't even go to the Puppy website. They'd probably record my IP address and track me down and force me at gunpoint to install it on all my computers. I've never seen anything more childish on Slashdot or Digg.
===========
An interesting suggestion.
However some people may uninstall the software after the Puppy fanatic is arrested and locked up in a maximum security zoo.
========
Is there a leader of the Puppy community who will stand up and renounce their actions? Or does the leadership of the community agree with them?
========
As official crustacean I would suggest their actions are reflective of their condition and attitudes. We do not advocate issuing death threats to those posting bad reviews or even those not yet able to provide a review but 'it would be bad' if they did. Such actions are I believe illegal in most parts of the world.
Just because the 'leadership' does not renounce something, does not mean agreement. Sometimes being ridiculous is best left to clowns like me.
141 • I would have expeced better of you, lobiester #140 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 04:47:43 GMT from Canada)
Would you care to have the dececy to retract your statement
Yours was carefully calculated w/ deliberate malice aforethought :
Quote:
"issuing death threats to those posting bad reviews"
That's only the last of many flame baiting posts, here & on Puppy
which started or kept vitriol ball rolling !
142 • Death Race 2000 (by Landor on 2007-10-09 05:00:20 GMT from Canada)
I can't believe the race is on to brand one misinterpreted comment by another user here as a "Death Threat". This coming from a community who prides itself on intelligence and abilities that most others in the world would consider genius by any standard.
It tells me one of two things. Either the belief of those in this community having a persona of raw and pure genius for the most part is ludicrous at best, or that with this level of intelligence comes a degree of insanity.
Regardless of the above, people really need to breathe, smile, and go watch (snickers) Oprah or something.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
(still shaking head at "Contacting the FBI". How many times has that been played out online. I'm guessing whomever the poster is, they have no worries of any legal intervention, only drama added for the above in regard to my second paragraph)
143 • And what should we do about... (by ShakaZ on 2007-10-09 05:09:53 GMT from Belgium)
the "Keep your stick on the ice" fanatic...
Read it so many times that i'm starting to see sticks on the eyes everywhere... are you trying to start a new religion or something?
& pleeaze no Oprah for me ^^
144 • Opensuse 10.3 Package Management (by phobe on 2007-10-09 05:59:37 GMT from China)
I left Opensuse 10.1 for Ubuntu due to package management issues, but in 10.3 those seem to be non-existent. I've always liked the stability Opensuse offered but didn't want the hassles with updating. Now in 10.3 all that's history, and their one-click web-based software is phenomenal. Seems Ubuntu has some serious competition coming its way.
145 • @142 and @143 (by EduardoZ on 2007-10-09 06:18:40 GMT from United States)
Yeah, but he was both right and not annoying this time. And a bonus point for good title. Well said, Landor. The petty "gotcha" fingerpointing is almost as bad as we see among Congressmen and Senators and candidates for office, and their minions.
Keep you schtick on ice.
146 • RE: A back against the wall is better than a trip out back :) (by Landor on 2007-10-09 06:43:54 GMT from Canada)
"In that realm, pubs on weekend are full of - types that, it's not wise to offend But it was mid-week, the watering hole almost deserted
Settling in at a dark table, w/back against wall (just in case)
I gagged down the snack, and sipped my beer."
I was hmm, indoctrined into such places at a very early age via and older uncle well aquainted shall we say with such regulars of said places in the North and East ends of Hamilton which both areas are famous from their again shall we say, "tempered" industrial steel town roots. :)
It can be a disturbing experience yes, but also a welcome one, where respect is paramount, and one learns that even a lingering look is offending to others. Few people outside such realms learn such respect for others.
On a brighter note, a local old time band by the name of Crowbar (known by hippies world wide for their song "Oh What A Feeling") would play often at just that kind of bar and I met one woman who graciously spent time with me anytime the band was playing at a bar and I went to see them, since she was a bit of a groupie :)
Speaking of groupies, and bring this back to Linux. Although I have found that the normal exuberance? related to their distro uncalled for, I have changed my thoughts on the mattter. Without said dedication to Linux in general it wouldn't be where it is today. Without those promoting it even zealously it would be left to those like myself who just tell people about it, try once to get them to take a peek, then leave it at that. I don't think in that case it would've evolved into what it has.
So for those who have been called zealots, fanatics, fanbois, touters, we probably wouldn't be where we are with you, just as much as Linus and the Devs.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
147 • Thanks for the laugh! (by Anonymous Fun on 2007-10-09 06:49:06 GMT from Philippines)
What a DWW issue - am literally ROTFL :D
I could DIE happily now.
(Er, please don't call the FBI, OK?)
148 • Ubuntu CompizFusion (by Anna Llopart on 2007-10-09 06:51:22 GMT from Spain)
What about the minimun hardware to use CompizFusion?? Is it the most Linux interactice desktop??
allopart@santpau.es
Thanks in advice
149 • Penguins on Parade (by Lobster on 2007-10-09 07:07:45 GMT from United Kingdom)
It is indeed fortunate that the professional and fair review by Susan Linton addresses both Puppy's strengths and weaknesses. Meanwhile . . . those so inclined can continue in the far more important business of trolling, flame baiting, fanboying and generally messing about. Linux is after all a very serious business - not 'just an operating system' as some have suggested. Linux is more important than life, death and religion . . . and do you know some people act accordingly. All hail Linus.
Are we having fun yet?
150 • Partial answer to #87 Suse and nice vim syntax painting. (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 07:12:16 GMT from France)
"Suse 10.3 fitting into my programming world (by Bill Savoie on 2007-10-08 20:08:07 GMT from United States)
I like the new SuSE 10.3 but I can't seem to get vim to do 'syntax on' highlight of my code. "
In Mandriva 2008.0, it seemed to work ... at least for (beta/RC).
Hope it will go on working...in due time.
There are separated packages in Mandriva ( in 2007.0 the adds on were broken) : as far as I recall, a minimal, monochromous vi and adds-on to syntax coloring;
perhaps it is the same thing with OpenSuse? and the nice syntax painter has been left in a repos?
Else, I am sure (never tried , as I was lucky enough to have my working OSes with vim in a good state) vim can be recompiled...
151 • RE 120, 122 : Mandriva 's very slow (and repetitive) agony. (by dbrion on 2007-10-09 07:43:36 GMT from France)
"
Why to support the french modems ?? Because people in France want to use internet too !
"
That is wrong; perhaps, in France, _some_ unwise trendy people want to use internet; others are obliged to use it, and others have decided to boycott it from their computers (for their children's sake, or because they consider IT access providers as little, unskilled, greedy Bill Gates)
******
during years I used Mandriva, and installed it on other person's computers. In the time of version 9 ... 10.2 it was good, principally for Linux beginners. For serious work not so much, because it is simply slow !!!
*******
I am terrified:
will my boss fire some of my colleagues who use Mandriva (10.2 > 2007.1) as being non serious?
FYI their work consists in Fortran programming and report writing/reading, for very serious issues [not distr hopping]=> if they use a clown distro, they should loose their work...
FYI while testing (to decide if it is worth buying next year) Mandriva 2008.0 RCx, I can remember I removed
beagle (as did Eudoxus do, for opensuse); it is very easy to remove useless services and to achieve honest response times.....even with unaccelerated qemu !
152 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 09:45:50 GMT from France)
FWIW, regarding the potential (mis)use of Distrowatch HPD in the real world, the OOo User Survey offers the following selection of distros:
15. If you are using OpenOffice.org on Linux, what Linux distribution are you using?
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
Debian
openSUSE
Fedora
Knoppix
Slackware
Freespire
Gentoo
Red Hat
Novell SLED
PCLinuxOS
Xandros
Mandriva
Linspire
Other
153 • The best Distrowatch Ever! (by Landlord on 2007-10-09 09:49:24 GMT from United States)
Thank you so much, for the best entertainment ever. I cried laughing! 8D
The puppy-killer... a non-reviewer... what a day!
And keep your stick in your pants, please!
154 • Major bug on openSUSE (by Charlie on 2007-10-09 09:55:14 GMT from Hong Kong)
There IS a major bug in openSUSE 10.3
Java/Java web plugin doesn't work in the system unless you add a line in the .bash_profile:
export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=1
Besides,openSUSE 10.3 really improved a lot,especially when you compare it with 10.2
155 • openSUSE 10.3 (by SatisfiedSuseUser on 2007-10-09 12:26:04 GMT from Canada)
Always an excellent Distrowatch weekly edition!
However, it seems to me that the anti-Novell trolls are posting en masse here. I downloaded the DVD version in just a few minutes over 2 hours from a mirror. Did a KDE install on three PCs at home: one recent (3600x2 Athlon), one Sempron 2400 Barton, and one old heat-producing Athlon 1200!! It took 22 minutes, 33 minutes and about 40 minutes on the Duron (I stripped the packages down to minimum on that one) to install.
Only one problem with install, and that was probably my sloppiness in looking at the Grub selection options for the MBR placement. Easily solved with OS's built-in option to revert to original MBR. On the 3600x2, 10.3 is fast! 25 seconds or so to boot, and KDE snaps. Particularly impressed with the "one-click" install capabilities. Did my Nvidia drivers in no time at all, without any manual intervention on my part, including afterwards!
I admit I have conventional gear, even only wired LAN/router, but openSUSE's ability to deal seamlessly with the diversity of PC generations at my house certainly indicates to me that the anti-Novell trolls are foaming at the mouth all over a very good release. Certainly the best since 9.3, and my usage of SUSE goes back to v7 or so, along with RH and Slackware.
The only other distros I have found up to the classiness, rock-solidness and is supported as openSUSE is PClinuxOS (2007 is an absolute gem), and Fedora.
Everyone's individual mileage may vary, as usual, and everyone has their preferred distro. That said, the behaviour of the anti-Novell trolls here is abusive, childish and (quite frankly), lowlife. Too dense to sort out and differentiate between Novell strategies that result in benefits to corporate customers, and the open source community's openSUSE work. Jealous, I guess, of greatness.
156 • Opensuse 10.3 (by JeffM on 2007-10-09 12:34:46 GMT from Canada)
Huge improvement boot time/software management over 10.2 !
Slight problems with getting nvidia 6800 GO vid card working on my Dell XPS Gen2 Laptop. Odd thing is, this morning when I booted it up, it won't run Xorg now.
Haven't tried wireless yet, but Suse was one of the few distros that my wireless work with out of the box.
157 • SUSE 10.3 (by Misfit on 2007-10-09 12:40:14 GMT from United States)
1. The install took an hour and a half of downloading.
2. It is buggy
3. It is very slow, the slowest of the 30 or so distros I have tried
4. It is very pretty, the best looking distro and installer ever.
5. My sound, ethernet and even my hp printer worked out of the box- this is impressive.
6. YAST and sax2 are horribly slow and buggy. After installing the nvidia video driver, my xorg.conf was automatically changed, but yielded an unusable configuration.
7. System-wide bugs. Clicking on apps sometimes gives 30 seconds of spinning hourglasses only to die, requiring re-clicking
8. Same bullshit as 10.2
158 • Re: #136 (by G Rajesh on 2007-10-09 12:52:29 GMT from India)
I tried to install the Acrobat Reader 8.1.1 rpm from adobe.com. But, it gives following error. However, I was able to use it in openSUSE 10.2.
error: rpmdbNextIterator: skipping h# 710 blob size(59844): BAD, 8 + 16 * il(17) + dl(1948)
error: rpmdbNextIterator: skipping h# 710 blob size(59844): BAD, 8 + 16 * il(17) + dl(1948)
Preparing... Segmentation fault
That's is what I meant by saying 'I miss AdobeReader-8.1.1 in the latest version.
Any way, thanks for your efforts.
159 • Russian schools move to Linux (by Positive Moves on 2007-10-09 12:58:37 GMT from Australia)
Russian schools move to Linux
Web user looks at the Linux home page
Russian students will be getting used to the Linux screen
Schoolchildren in Russia are to be taught using the free, open-source Linux software in an effort to cut the cost of teaching information technology.
By 2009, all computers in Russian schools are to be run on Linux - which means they will not have to pay to use licensed software, such as Microsoft's Windows.
[...]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7034828.stm
160 • Suse 10.3 (by Gene Venable on 2007-10-09 13:10:24 GMT from United States)
I've been a user of Suse since 10.1 and earlier versions I forget their numbers. This version sounds great, but for me it comes up blank after doing what seems to be a successful install. I'm not sure what the problem is; I'll stick with my latest favorite, Mint, till I figure it out, and then I'll run both of them.
161 • #157 Impressive? (by herman at 2007-10-09 14:06:35 GMT from Europe)
"5. My sound, ethernet and even my hp printer worked out of the box- this is impressive."
I beg to differ, this is considered standard behaviour of any modern Linux distribution. Frankly, I tend to toss any distro that cannot nicely configure all three out of the window right away.
As for perceived Suse buginess and slowness, that does sound disappointing.
Suse desperately needs a smashing release to gain back mindshare after the you know what.
As for the prettiness, that is irrelevant and I couldn't care less.
Gnome is Gnome, KDE is KDE, or am I missing something.
It sounds as if this release might fail to impress the army of *Buntu users, which is where the openSuse people should be fishing.
Suse used to be the top dog..
162 • RE 157 Suse, bugs and gardening. (by dbrion on 2007-10-09 14:21:42 GMT from France)
"
7. System-wide bugs." Are these
a) Kernel panics
b) Filesystems crashes
d) Blue screens of hope (that's linux and I remain politically correct, though terrified).
"
Clicking on apps sometimes gives 30 seconds of spinning hourglasses only to die, requiring re-clicking
"
Ouf! it is just that the package manager is somewhat slow (on which HW??? ) and sometimes locks....it can be even restarted....
"8. Same bullshit as 10.2"
Why download, then? it just contributes to trafic-jams.
But every hope is not lost:
as lawns and flowers like organic fertilizers, perhaps you could bury your PC in a garden's soil : the grass would be greener, the trees greater, the flowers more beautifull....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
163 • Mandriva 2008.0 - Simply Wonderful (by Judland on 2007-10-09 14:24:58 GMT from Canada)
Being an "early seeder" for the Mandriva 2008.0 release, I'm happy to say that I've now been using it on my main PCs for two days now.
This latest release of Mandriva is, quite frankly, a work of OS art.
I don't know how they've done it, but KDE is faster than ever, Compiz is much more stable and responsive than I've experienced in the past, and URPMI works like a dream. I've even updated my URPMI repository via teh command line AND still had the GUI running and did not get the "lock out" error that I usually got in the past.
The work and dedication of the Mandriva dev. team and community bug submitters has really paid off with this release.
Congratulations, Mandriva!
164 • Qu 163 : *rpm* database locks? (they intrigued me for years) (by dbrion on 2007-10-09 14:40:59 GMT from France)
***************
I've even updated my URPMI repository via teh command line AND still had the GUI running and did not get the "lock out" error that I usually got in the past.
***********************
What is the explanation of these locks?
BTW Thanks for the good news
165 • Fluxbox (by anticapitalista on 2007-10-09 15:01:21 GMT from Greece)
Fluxbox 1.0.0 Released
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/version-0.9.php
Congratulations to all devs and testers involved in the project.
166 • Well now.... (by Oiving on 2007-10-09 15:02:44 GMT from United States)
"Mandriva Linux 2008 has been released: "We are proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download. The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases."
I guess this means we can expect a big PCLinuxOS upgrade or new release soon, eh?
167 • Removed openSUSE 10.3 and Switched back to Arch Linux (by Walter on 2007-10-09 15:05:41 GMT from United States)
I've been using SuSE since around 1998. Up until last year, I had openSUSE 10.2 running on an Athlon 64 2600+... it ran great, but I always seemed to have trouble with updates.
I recently gave Arch Linux another shot, and was pleasantly surprised. However, since openSUSE 10.3 was just released last week, I wanted to give the latest release a try. For the most part I like the improvements as long as I run gnome instead of KDE. The biggest disappointment came when I tried to activate SaX2 with an nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS video card. No matter what I tried, I continued to receive the error message telling me that the card does not support 3D.
I'm not saying that I will be able to get better results with Arch Linux, but at least it seems runs a lot faster smoother on my system. And at least to me, pacman makes package management and updates a lot easier.
168 • @166 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 15:26:40 GMT from United States)
Mandriva 2008 >>> "I guess this means we can expect a big PCLinuxOS upgrade or new release soon, eh?"
Maybe. Why would this be a big ol' stinking deal to you?
169 • Re: 166 • Well now.... (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 15:41:43 GMT from Malaysia)
"I guess this means we can expect a big PCLinuxOS upgrade or new release soon, eh?"
I doubt it. PCLOS did their first rebase a few months ago and it looks like they'll be 'rolling' updates (rather than a new release) for the near future.
170 • Well now (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 16:16:46 GMT from United States)
> "I guess this means we can expect a big PCLinuxOS upgrade or new release soon, eh?"
There are already 500 mb of updates available since the 2007 PCLinuxOS release so yeh they might do an updated iso. So what? Doesnt have anything to do with Mandriva. Anyway congrats to Mandriva. Nice release.
171 • Suse 10.3 broke boot up disc in windows?? (by Robzilla on 2007-10-09 16:34:12 GMT from United States)
I have installed Suse linux twice and each time it has broken my ability to boot into windows Vista?? Very odd.
I am not going to be able to use Suse if this keeps happening! Wonder if anyone else had this problem?
R
172 • PCLinuxOS rippers (by Oiving on 2007-10-09 16:38:14 GMT from United States)
"Maybe. Why would this be a big ol' stinking deal to you?"
Touched a nerve, eh?
Well, now.
173 • @Oiving (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-09 17:17:55 GMT from Canada)
PCLOS do not rebase against every Mandriva release. They have, as a previous poster said, rebased only once: initial PCLOS base was Mandrake 9.2, second base was Mandriva 2007. It's not certain that the next time they update their base system, it'll be using Mandriva as a base, that's just how they've done it so far. In any case, as far as I know, they've no plan to rebase off 2008 for now. Their loss ;) (I kid!)
174 • Re: 173 (by DrDOS on 2007-10-09 17:25:23 GMT from United States)
Thank you Adam Williamson for that very sensible reply to Oiving. Oiving doesn't seem to understand the nature of the GPL. Hopefully this page can get away from the bashing and flaming that has occurred here for the past week or so.
175 • Lalitera multidistrox 0.95 (by adrian15 on 2007-10-09 17:35:40 GMT from Spain)
Two weeks ago I was talking here about Super Live Boot.
I want that Lalitera multidistrox 0.95 (Knoppix + Super Grub Disk) is tested.
ISO and MD5 are found here:
http://sgd.howto-linux.de/download/binaries/lalitera/lalitera_multidistrox_0.95.iso
http://sgd.howto-linux.de/download/binaries/lalitera/lalitera_multidistrox_0.95.iso.md5
And you can learn more about the super live boot technology here:
http://supergrub.forjamari.linex.org/?section=documentation#super_live_boot
Any comment in this forums or at adrian15sgd THEROUNDTHING gmail DOT com or at the super grub disk mailing list is welcomed.
adrian15
176 • opensuse 10.3 :-( (by stefan on 2007-10-09 17:36:32 GMT from Netherlands)
well i also tried opensuse 10.3 x64 dvd and I must admit it was not a pleasant experience. It had a really positive vibe on the internet the past few weeks and the grub / bootsplash are really smooth. the boot was quite fast too so i had such high hopes.
*) it killed my M$ Vista partition, i could not boot vista at all anymore. While this is in fact a good thing .... i don't think it was supposed to do that, it did make me delete windows alltogether now ;-)
*) the default (gnome and kde) desktops look really polished ...... but oh my the fonts are SO ugly. especially in firefix. Fedora and OpenSolaris are SO much better at this
*) it detected my 24" tft screen correctly .... but it is the ONLY distro to date that couldn't display 1920x1200@50 on it, it just gave me a black screen
*) yast has imprived but it is still rather slow and refreshes All The Time making me wait over and over. also the refresh animation looks strangely out of place compared to my gtk theme
*) it is still rpm based .... this is just a personal opinion but i prefer .deb or pacman oriented distros, in a couple of days I had LOTS of dependency troubles already
*) why are there SO many options in the control center, i mean around 8 icons regarding software packages/updates it is just too much. Ubuntu has too many tools (synaptic, add/rem, apt, aptitude) but this is just insane.
*) the SLAB is very slow, memory intensive and not very nice to work with, i mean a popup window for starting apps ...... come one already
*) there is SO much stuff installed by default .... admitted that this is just a case of personal preference and stuff can be unselected during install
*) it has xorg 7.2 and i understand that it will keep xorg 7.2 during the entire lifetime of 10.3. i would have preferred xorg7.3 with my nvidia quadro
*) suspend to ram did not work
*) wireless did not work at all using either network manager, i had to bring it up manually using ifup and at the office switch back manually toth network manager.
*) OOo was rather slow, compared to other 2.3 offerings. especially to boot.
so all in all a rather disappointing experience, not unlike 10.2 for me. I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised because it would work great as a business desktop, but i will wait for Ubuntu 7.10 or Opensolaris Indiana this month.
i have since deleted it (and vista now too just too bad about all my outlook contacts and photoshop cs3) and replaced it with Opensuse SXDE nv_73. now That is a slick looking gnome desktop (2.18 still and unfortunately no package management yet).
177 • @Oiving (by Texstar on 2007-10-09 17:37:06 GMT from United States)
Not really dude. This is Mandriva's time to shine not us. Anyway congrats to Mandriva. Mighty fine release.
178 • Good job Adam & the MDV team ! (by Caraibes on 2007-10-09 17:40:51 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Well, Adam, I am downloading those 3 Free cd's as we speak, and I am ready to wipe my Suse partition for Mandriva asap... Good job !
Suse was an excellent experience for those past 5 days, but I just don't "feel at home" with it... Can't really say any bad thing about it... It was mostly good.
But my PC wants his Fedora/Mandriva dual-boot !
I am however downloading the PPC Suse for my Mac iBook... Both Ubuntu & Debian behaved strange with it, I hope PPC Suse will be as good as its i386 counterpart...
179 • RE Caraibes Say NO to your PC!!! (by dbrion on 2007-10-09 18:04:54 GMT from France)
"
But my PC wants his Fedora/Mandriva dual-boot !
"
I ll wait till due time (what does 2008.0) mean? and look at my colleagues tests (I played with Mandriva2008 betas, Rcs and did not find any horror, but I prefer to wait...)
BTW I was lucky notto have used Virtual Box, as it seems difficult to have her working (cf "http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/Errata" [edit] Mandriva often dies when running as a VirtualBox guest : this is attributed to tickless kernels, and perhaps could explain the death of other distrs...).
=> I hope Mandriva keeps a gorgeous (a friend of mine found it gorgeous too, without any irony) errata list, easy to understand (AFAN it taught me).
PCs are not tyrans....
180 • re: 179 (by Caraibes on 2007-10-09 18:33:13 GMT from Dominican Republic)
Don't worry, Dbrion, as my Fedora 7 partition is my "stable partirion". I use the other partition to test distros... Right now I have openSUSE 10.3... It's not bad... Many good innovations. But sometimes FF crashes, or apps freeze.
So installing a fresh MDV 2008 doesn't jeopardize my day to day work, that I can still handle from F7 if needed...
I am just curious !
181 • @176 (by Glenn at 2007-10-09 18:36:38 GMT from Canada)
Hi Stephan
That happened to me also, losing partition and being unable to boot after installing a distro. I used SUPERGRUB to recover,
At his request I was installing a linux distro on a collegues work PC and when his system failed to boot at all, the expression on his face was interesting to see. :-) (Probably mine was also)
With SUPERGRUB and fixing the MBR I at least got him his windows boot back and he decided to wait for another day to install Linux. :-).
On a side note:
Having fun distro hopping I also tried OpenSuse 10.3 and my experience was quite similar to yours except that I did not lose any partitions I found Opensuse ok but it is not for me, I have just installed Mandrive 2008 (about 1/2 hour to do) to test it, in fact I am typing this while testing it. I found it much nicer for my taste . Mandriva did a really nice job! First distro to enable and use 3d on my Thinkpad T60.
Glenn
182 • If you are looking for a good cause. (by DrDOS on 2007-10-09 18:41:05 GMT from United States)
I don't think you can have a better one than this if you favor FOSS.
http://www.cybersource.com.au/users/conz/why_the_unbundling_windows_sceptics_are_wrong.html
183 • @176 (by adrian15 on 2007-10-09 19:17:22 GMT from Spain)
Hi Stefan if you use Super Grub Disk -> Windows -> Boot of Windows can you boot windows Vista or not?
The question is are you sure that the windows partition has been erased or is it just that you cannot boot it?
adrian15
Offtopic P.S.: Lalitera Multidistrox contains Super Grub Disk + Knoppix check above link for testing it.
184 • 175 (by Landor on 2007-10-09 19:45:16 GMT from Canada)
I can see how super grub might be helpful to some just coming over to Linux, but aside from that group I don't understand how it could be useful to anyone else.
It's a simple task to boot from the live cd of your distro , drop to the cli from a terminal and chroot into your install then fix the problem.
Hopefully not many will mess it up that bad anyway.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
185 • OpenSUSE 10.3 installation, etc. (by Nanlee on 2007-10-09 19:46:24 GMT from Canada)
I downloaded OpenSUSE 10.3 over the weekend and installed and played with it on one of my old PC. It has a PII 233, 150Mb memory and a 4Gb hard drive, which previously had MCN (a variation of Mandriva) installed. The old MCN created 3 partitions on this small hard drive, a 2.2G for system, a 1.3 G for documents and a small swap partition.
I used the KDE CD for my installation. During my first installation, I basically followed the OpenSUSE's suggestion and completed the 3 hour installation without a glitch, well almost, until the system showed an error message indicating that there is no more room on the hard drive for the installation of on-line updates. The problem was that OpenSUSE 10.3 picked the 2.2 G partition for the system, which was just enough for the initial installation.
To solve the problem, I did a second installation. Considering that the hard drive is relatively small in size, I wanted to remove the 1.3 Gb partition and combine it with the 2.2 Gb to create big partition for the system. When it came to the point to customize my installation, I selected the option to remove the 1.3 Gb partition. But, the system won't allow me to do it, saying that the system is using it for information used for the installation. I tried to remove the swap partition, but was unable to do that for the same reason. Knowing that if I continue the installation, it will end up the same way as the previous one, I aborted the installation.
I had a Windows 98 CD on the desk, so I used it to boot the PC and repartitioned and formated the hard drive. Then, I did the third installation. This time, I should be able to create a bigger partition for my system, right? right? I should, if I didn't make another mistake. Instead of creating a swap partition, when asked, I chose to create a swap file, hoping that I can have the entire hard drive as one big partition for the system. Well, I wasn't able to format the partition for Linux, because, you guessed it, the partition was used by the swap file. I failed again.
So now, I have two choices for my next installation. The first is to use a Linux live CD (such as GParted) to partition the hard drive and format it with one of the Linux file system before install OpenSUSE 10.3. The second, is to create a swap partition during the installation. Then I remembered the size of the swap file during my previous installation was more than 1Gb, which was much bigger than the 500Mb swap partition it was trying to create. So, I decided to use the second option, that is, to create a 500Mb swap partition. This time, it worked. I was able to create and format a 3.5 Gb partition, enough for the initial installation and the online updates.
About the performance of OpenSUSE 10.3:
On this old PC, I have successfully installed Vector 5.8, Slackware 11, MCN Toronto, Sabayon and Debian 4.0 before, but none of them was perfect. Slackware with Xfce worked OK but I did like the file manager. Vector was the same. Sabayon looks great, but it was slow. The mouse moved like in "slow motion" with jittery. MCN was a pleasant surprise with nice KDE interface and feels very quick and responsive. But, it couldn't see my sound card, let alone to find a driver for it. Debian did find my sound card and was relatively quick. But, I can not do other work when playing a MP3 file, it would interrupt the music.
Now, the OpenSUSE 10.3. It was very responsive with the mouse movement, but reaction to mouse click is not as quick as MCN or Debian. It found my sound card easily and it can multi-tasking while playing music. But, all the applications took very long to start, I did not time it, but it feels much longer than MCN did. (Question for the experts out there: does this have to do with file encryption? Will separate system and your data files into separate partitions help to improve this?)
Another problem was the support for different screen resolutions. The OpenSUSE 10.3 found my video card and my monitor, it chose to use the highest resolution the card can support 1600x1200 and a strange 15 bit color depth. When forced to 1240x1024 and 16 bit, it crashed. This was done very easily on MCN.
Overall, I was relatively happy with OpenSUSE 10.3. I believe it would work very well on computers with a little bit faster CPUs.
Suggestion:
I think the installation script for OpenSUSE 10.3 can be change to avoid the problem I had with partition. All they need to do is to prepare the hard drive (partitioning and formating) before creating the swap. I remember many of the Linux distros (even MS Windows, I think) uses this approach. Also, moving the steps of creating the file for online repositories to a later stage of the installation can reduce the need for large swap file.
186 • @183 (by stefan on 2007-10-09 20:03:46 GMT from Netherlands)
hi,
thanks for all the replies. I do know HOW to fix windows Vista if I had to, either by using supergrub or just a plain old live cd, it is just that i think it is really bad that i would need to. i mean come on this is SuSe we are talking about they should know better. from just reading these comments there are at least three people where Vista was destroyed by a distro that is claiming the #1 desktop distro 2007 award. this has not happened to me since redhat 5.2 back in the days. so I really think OpenSuSe (10.3) has tried but came up short for me, it is really crappy imho.
I was going to wait for Fedora 8 now but i heard that they were not going to include xorg 7.3 :-( maybe just maybe that means i will have to go with Ubuntu 7.10 then.......
and no i can't actually recover Vista anymore, i took this as a sign to finally say farewell to that ^$%#^$%#&^#$&$&@ crap that is M$ Vista, it makes even XP a more then half decent OS and I even had Ultimate on my notebook but lack of drivers, extras, 3 min boot times and that horrible performance made me stay away from it 99% of the time anyway, i just used it to sync my qtek with outlook (i do miss outlook and my contacts to be honest) and for photoshop CS3.
stefan
187 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-09 20:08:08 GMT from United States)
> and no i can't actually recover Vista anymore
Maybe your computer is lazy and got tired of working so hard to do so little. Linux will let it rest regularly.
188 • Cujo Unleashed/RE: 97 (by Landor on 2007-10-09 20:32:57 GMT from Canada)
"97 • Obsessive Puppies (by Anonymous on 2007-10-08 20:47:05 GMT from United States)
some Puppies are so obsessed
Caitlyn's reputation is stained? Not where I sit. The Puppies who attacked her here are the ones that look like idiots to me."
Dear Obsessively Anonymous,
From the time frame of post 97 and 99 I could only believe that you are the one who misread the intention and started the whole intent of Death by Font fiasco.
I must've missed post 97 in light of the title Death Threats? for 99.
Reading it now has brought some clear observations to the fore. You posted both comments in all seriousness. That is very obvious.
The problem I observed though is someone could be that serious and keep calling the people Puppies!
Scary
Keep your stick on the ice... or whatever clime "you live in"
Landor
189 • OpenOffice.org - User Survey (by Tervel on 2007-10-09 20:40:08 GMT from Austria)
"Please complete the survey below to help us improve the OpenOffice.org suite for you. Thank you."
http://survey.services.openoffice.org/user/ooo_survey_july_2007_en.php
190 • Mandriva Download (by Chris on 2007-10-09 23:32:57 GMT from United States)
I just downloaded the Mandriva One 2008.0 KDE iso from
http://www.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mandrake/official/iso/2008.0
The download speed was good.
Verizon DSL gives me about 350 KByte/Sec max
Other mirrors were slow, like 12 KByte/Sec.
I started at the Mandriva home page,
followed the links to the 2007 Spring download
and changed to the 2008 directory.
Mandriva gives you a list of mirrors.
191 • @190 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-09 23:35:18 GMT from Canada)
the new version of mandriva.com is a bit in flux at the moment. in a few days it'll settle down and there'll be proper download links and everything.
192 • Puppy 3 power (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 00:34:26 GMT from Australia)
Congrats must go to Barry Kauler, who has listened to criticism about it being difficult to build Puppy up into a desktop system. He has responded by rescripting the system to make it compatible with Slackware. I think few devs would respond this quickly. When Puppy gets the slaptget package manager included it will be an even more versatile distro - able to run in RAM, able to run from a frugal install, or able to be built up into a desktop system (with a very fast boot time).
193 • pup stuff (by jonyo on 2007-10-10 01:05:26 GMT from Canada)
Very good observations for taking the time to have a look (that I'd say few have) & imo is right on the money. However in regards to the "one member", their is usually a supporting cast hence their are many more, therefore I fully agree with your final comments.
Also, radicals can be like anything thing else, good, bad or ugly but then there is also diff strokes for diff folks. :-O Then it comes down to who decides.
I wouldn't put anything into anonymous postings particularly when against a known. All it usually does is stir the pot even if points made have great merit.
cheers,
_______________________________________________
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070625&mode=43
#293 • Re #290 (by roadie on 2007-07-01 17:42:51 GMT from Canada)
"The underlying currents in that forum are definitely powerful."
Most definitely, one member in particular seems to take great delight in hurling insults.
"I have noticed though, the majority who have come here to post, and in quite an aggressive manner, have been the "other faction" so to speak."
I noticed the same, which is actually what led me to look around there. The "radicals" of any group seem to seek out a public venue.
"I've tried to explain that this is more of a underlying problem that they need to look at deeply, to no avail."
Personally, I think it's gone (been allowed to go) too far. It would take a rather nasty "housecleaning" to restore order.
194 • RE: 193 (by Landor on 2007-10-10 01:26:31 GMT from Canada)
I had to do a double take on post 193 when I saw comments I was sure I made! lol
That was a couple months ago :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
195 • suse 10.3 (by Tim Brooke-Taylor on 2007-10-10 02:39:36 GMT from United States)
I agree with the majority here that suse is severely lacking when it comes to speed, reliability, package management and above all the infamous bloat.
What's the point in looking pretty if trying to do anything is fraught with slowness and GUI crashes?
I'm glad I won't be sued for using suse, and that's what makes me stay with them, but I have to admit that I'm hoping someone else signs a protection deal with Microsoft soon.
196 • 195 • suse 10.3 (by Tim Brooke-Taylor) (by observer on 2007-10-10 03:18:37 GMT from Australia)
>>What's the point in looking pretty if trying to do anything is fraught with slowness and GUI crashes?<<
And has anyone done a scientific performance test/s for important productive functionality between various distros on same/common hardware?
I use openSUSE 10.2 and find it is the best distro for my Notebook, primarily for its Yast power management utility. I installed the SMART package manager and have no "speed" issues regarding software updates, it works perfectly well. It is stable, has great selection of software, looks great (excellent font display), fantastic configuration utilities/tools and it allows me to install on a preformatted partition wthout reformatting, which is a great plus for anyone wanting to continue using older hdd utilities such as Partition Magic 8, Acronis 7, PQ Drive Image 7, etc (these utilities will not work once partitions are touched by Gparted, which can not be avoided if one uses distros such as Ubuntu).
IMO, the "infamous bloat" is just nonsense - moronic distro-bashing drivel!
openSUSE, like Fedora, is a bleeding edge distro and you are bound to get minor (sometimes major) bugs when their is a major re-work of the distro. If you are new to Fedora and openSUSE and do not want to be hassled by initial release bugs (and there will always be some), it is best to wait a month or two before installing. Do that and you shall enjoy two of the finest distros around with much less bother.
197 • RE post #193 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 04:12:35 GMT from Canada)
Jonyo , Sir:
A very true & "safe" approach to take to as defence against ugliness :
Quote:
"All it usually does is stir the pot "
But history has proved: < N.Chamberelain tried to appease then-hidden Facist goals,
even signed non-aggression pact - multi-millions paid the price
of staying silent & ignoring evils
Trouble is ~ Merely by suggesting silence is the remedy -> is to promote further discussion
Sadly, you yourself are now threatend by Murga's heirarchy
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=145951
All dark sides of Puppy community is only possible when approved by administrators/cronies
It UNJUSTLY tars all Puppy users as being fanatical zealots
Plse Note > J.M will immediately ban anyone who "posts death threats"
But NOT those who have already made same false accusations -
The only truth as a "point" it wasn't "verifified as coming from a Puppy member" !
Stated by an EASL it might be viewed as a "translation problem"
As a higher formally-trained academic (RaffY) - that behaviour is appalling
How did Mr Murga contain himself - by slurs of valid comments _
Quote:
"The original post is not a death threat, just a pretty dumb attempt at being clever."
All stems from above
The "gentleman-clown" who did more to promote vitriol against CM ?
Review FACTS & decide for yourselves.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=22223
As voiced before -
The fight for freedom is never over = The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Not all roads lead to Rome -nor do all Rhodes schollars - lead to hallowed halls of Roman ideals
But it was said better, by far more intelligent minds than myself, many centuries past:
"Nihil est incentius vulgo, nihil obscurious volante hominum,
nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum
Tantane animis caelsetibus irae" ?
198 • Ultimate Ubuntu-to-Fedora transition guide (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 04:25:15 GMT from Australia)
Ultimate Ubuntu-to-Fedora transition guide
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=568481
199 • Mandriva One 2008??? (by Pless on 2007-10-10 05:14:43 GMT from Norway)
I'm fed up with all the talk about OpenSUSE, so I tried the new Mandriva instead. Strangely, it fails before bringing up X / KDE.
The Md5 checksum tallies, k3b claimed success with burning the image, and the process of booting the live system seems to work well. For a while.
Well, it isn't unusual that some distros won't install or work on some systems, so why do I bring this up? Firstly, because it puzzles me that Mandriva live will not boot, when a number of other live distros do. Secondly, in a, probably vain, hope that someone, somewhere mith have a clue to what is going on...
200 • 199 Mandriva not starting X (by Landor on 2007-10-10 05:25:51 GMT from Canada)
It seems that it's not properly detecting your graphic's card and failing on the wrong one.
I am not versed in Mandriva and what options but there should be a boot option (every distro I've tried has it) to boot with VESA as default. So try the VESA boot option and see if it at least gets you to the desktop where you can try it out, and see if there are any solutions to your actual graphic card.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
201 • 200 Mandriva not starting X (by Pless on 2007-10-10 05:51:45 GMT from Norway)
Thanks for the suggestion. I will see if I can find a VESA option. Choosing F3 for booting options seemed to give me only one alternative when I tried it, but I'll try again :)
202 • @201 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 05:59:03 GMT from Canada)
I'm not sure there actually *is* an option to boot with the VESA driver, but what you can do is press ctrl-alt-F1 after it fails to start X, which should give you a console login screen. login as root (no password), run 'drakx11' - that's the graphics card configuration tool - and set up your card. then when you're done, quit and run 'service -f dm' to restart X.
if it's something deeper than just failing to start X, let me know and I'll think of something else. what's the hardware in question?
203 • RE 176 "I want that Lalitera multidistrox 0.95 (..) is tested." (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 07:23:24 GMT from France)
I tried to test it from VirtualBox.
The fist menu has too short a time out (no time to concentrate/admire) => you should put at least one minute timeout for the first menu, at best an INFINITE timeout, that the user has not the impression of a taylorian against a computer....
The language selection is clumsy : I choose French, of course, and the menus keep on being ... in English...
There is no separate language and keyboard mapping selection.
I will go further one of these week-ends, but it does not appeal a slow user (do you want to limit your audience to < 35 yrs, male bachelors without professional duties?) Or is meant to other people? Who might be very happpy of NOT racing during their free time?
204 • Cor 203 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 07:28:36 GMT from France)
taylorian -> taylorian race (à la "Les temps Modernes," with C. Chaplin)
205 • #31 openSUSE 10.3 apology (by capricornus on 2007-10-10 07:52:37 GMT from Belgium)
I did it again! I wiped the openSUSE partition and started all over again, unchecking all rep' s. Things went much better this time, within 30' on a Sempron2600 system, I was running a nice distro.
I don' t like Banshee: it does not very well on highly compressed files (like http://somafm.com/groovesalad24.pls), Videolan gives much more depth to the sound... well, first thing like always, I searched for VLC: not to be found in the rep' s. I found it elsewhere and did a 1-click install: I never saw a distro that took so much time to install a rather small prog like VLC. Never.
But what does openSUSE offer me in surplus? Is there an added value to be found by common users like me? I don' t think so. I' m running PClinuxOS, Mepis 6.5, Wolvix 1.1 Hunter, Puppy 3 and most of the time LinuxMint 3.1 Celena: it has the ease, the speed, the graphics, and it is complete enough for me - and it has a friendly community. Try it, just for once !
206 • Mandriva 2008 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 09:25:44 GMT from France)
Just to say that Mandriva 2008.0 is ..as we say in french "une daube"
Too many bugs :
- unable to mount automatically /dev/cdrom and to write it in your /etc/fstab; You've to do this manually
- unable to update from repositories 'your cpu is not supported' (AMD64)
- after install when you reboot you get a blank screen
and many so on ......
It's not for a newbie who will prefer perhaps 'XP' or another distro
That a bad experience for me (as I paid to get the powerpack)
207 • @206 (by goom on 2007-10-10 10:36:28 GMT from France)
Your experience is yours not the Truth
I've installed Mandriva 2008 on 2 computers (and on one i've tested the powerpack and the free, not yet the ONE) and on both the computer i can access either my dvd reader, dvd writer or cd writer. No manual intervention was to be done for listening a CD, watching de DVD or looking at data on a CD or DVD.
About the cpu not supported i don't know, no problem on 586, i will test on 64 bits
No blank screen after reboot.
About the many so on ... well easy to say many, it costs nothing but for me it is without interest.
Well bad for you as others has bad experience with other distros or with Vista.
Maybe you should breath a bit and try again. (By the way did you verify your download ?)
208 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 11:02:18 GMT from France)
"191 • @190 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-09 23:35:18 GMT from Canada)
the new version of mandriva.com is a bit in flux at the moment. in a few days it'll settle down and there'll be proper download links and everything."
so goom read all comments before.....
209 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 11:58:34 GMT from France)
Of mandriva.COM the site, not the distro, dont misuse other people's comment.
- unable to update from repositories 'your cpu is not supported' (AMD64)
This problem is fixed, it's a wrong error message caused by empty repository. The empty repository are empty because no updates yet and because the empty hdlist.cz hadndt been replicated yet.
- after install when you reboot you get a blank screen
untrue.
- unable to mount automatically /dev/cdrom and to write it in your /etc/fstab; You've to do this manually
one person has had this bug so far, this person hasnt given any further information, hasnt verified this media and just rant on every site on earth. Good luck to this person, bad mouthing is a dirty job.
210 • Qu #206/(#208) : What does 2008.0 mean? (by dbrion on 2007-10-10 12:00:04 GMT from France)
From @196 (Observer from Australia)
"If you are new to Fedora and openSUSE and do not want to be hassled by initial release bugs (and there will always be some), it is best to wait a month or two before installing."
Just add Mandriva to the list, and change installing into "buying and installing" and one can notice that, sometimes, salutary common sense exists!
FYI Mandriva's errata lists are most valuable (instructive guidelines) in themselves....
211 • Mandriva One 2008 (by Alter Ekko on 2007-10-10 15:18:14 GMT from Norway)
Mandriva One 2008 live cd -
made a very pleasant visit to
1. a 2,4GHz Intel desktop some years old: everything worked ok
2. a HP Pavilion laptop 1,7GHz dualcore: everything including Intel wlan,
X: 1280x800 (had to logout/in), sound, automounted ntfs&fat32 partitions
on the SATA disk.
212 • #176 rpm (by herman at 2007-10-10 15:22:35 GMT from Europe)
"*) it [suse] is still rpm based .... this is just a personal opinion but i prefer .deb or pacman oriented distros, in a couple of days I had LOTS of dependency troubles already"
I don't wanna be a wiseass, but I hope someone somewhere reading this will remember: teh notohriuz deb vs rpm issue has *nothing*, actually <>, as a matter of fact, _nothing_//, and perhaps even NOTHING to do with dependency troubles.
!!
213 • A message for Adam Williamson. (by IMQ on 2007-10-10 15:46:05 GMT from United States)
Remember I had the hard disk slowness problem with RC2 last week?
Well, I am happy to say that the problem is now gone in the final release I just installed freshly on the same partition last night.
Here were the results running *hdparm* on hard both drives:
# hdparm -vtT /dev/hdb
/dev/hdb:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 65535/16/63, sectors = 117266688, start = 0
Timing cached reads: 952 MB in 2.00 seconds = 475.19 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 122 MB in 3.04 seconds = 40.15 MB/sec
# hdparm -vtT /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 36483/255/63, sectors = 586114704, start = 0
Timing cached reads: 914 MB in 2.00 seconds = 456.36 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 186 MB in 3.00 seconds = 62.00 MB/sec
As you can see, the disk reads on both drives were 12 to 20 times faster!
So, congratulations to Mandriva for a job well done !!!
BTW, I installed from the DVD Free Edition. I will test drive the KDE ONE on a different machine when I get some time to play.
I do have a quick question for you, if you don't mind: Is there a way to create a local repository from the rpm packages downloaded to /var/cache/urpmi/rpms on an external drive or burned to a CD/DVD so they can be installed on a machine with no internet access?
Thanks!
214 • 210 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 15:47:18 GMT from Malaysia)
dbrion wrote:
[Just add Mandriva to the list, and change installing into "buying and installing"]
You don't have to change 'installing' to 'buying and installing' as Mandriva continues to be available for download free of charge.
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/2008_released
http://www.mandriva.com/archives/en/company/press/pr/mandriva_simplifies_its_new_range_of_products_mandriva_linux_2008.html
215 • No subject (by Anonymous at 2007-10-10 16:07:09 GMT from France)
Comment deleted (flame).
216 • No subject (by Billou on 2007-10-10 16:09:10 GMT from France)
You would prefer the Ulteo from Gael Duval (ex-Mandriva) ?
It's known Mandriva had also problems with the 'Club', a business and money based one
217 • Mandriva DVD (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 16:14:10 GMT from Germany)
i downloaded the dvd version of 2008
and the md5sum is wrong:(
this always happens only with mandriva.
cdcheck tells me also mistake in reading the iso file.
win mistake number 87 or something.
218 • No subject (by Phil on 2007-10-10 16:15:03 GMT from France)
Is there any pb with Mandriva 2008 ? One of my friend our was an 'early seeder' talled me they have delayed the output and the repositories were empty ?
219 • No subject (by Kruks on 2007-10-10 16:17:26 GMT from France)
217 • Mandriva DVD (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 16:14:10 GMT from Germany)
i downloaded the dvd version of 2008
Don't use Mandriva, I think. Use Fedora or Opensuse or Ubuntu, you will have no surprise
220 • PCLOS vs MANDRIVA (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 16:39:18 GMT from France)
If PCLOS is based on Mandriva 2008, it will not be the 1st on Distro's ranking
221 • No subject (by Elmer on 2007-10-10 16:40:51 GMT from France)
Mandriva announced XFCE but where is it ? Nothing on the dvd and the repositories................
it's a joke?
222 • No subject (by Bigoud on 2007-10-10 16:41:56 GMT from France)
RE ; mandriva/"After 10.2 it falled in decadence."
as u say man........
223 • No subject (by Albert on 2007-10-10 16:42:51 GMT from France)
@RE 220 • PCLOS vs MANDRIVA (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 16:39:18 GMT from France)
If PCLOS is based on Mandriva 2008, it will not be the 1st on Distro's ranking
???????????
224 • @223 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 16:44:20 GMT from France)
If you base a distro on a bullshit you will not get a distro out of the box but out of the bugs
225 • @221 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 17:06:04 GMT from Canada)
It's in the repositories (in contrib, we didn't manage to move it to main in time for 2008). Just set up the repositories and install task-xfce or task-xfce-minimal.
226 • @218 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 17:06:58 GMT from Canada)
Not all mirrors have mirrored 2008 yet, but several have. You can use http://api.mandriva.com/mirrors/basic.2008.0.i586.list as a quick guide to the mirrors we've checked do have 2008 already.
227 • @217 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 17:08:24 GMT from Canada)
How did you download it?
If it's the Free DVD and you used FTP or HTTP, you could correct the download by using Bittorrent. Create a directory:
/somedirectory/mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-dvd-i586/
and put the .iso in it. Then download the torrent from http://torrent.mandriva.com/public and point your torrent client at /somedirectory . It should check the .iso file and then complete / repair the download.
228 • @213 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 17:13:02 GMT from Canada)
Great, I thought it would be fixed in final but I'm glad you confirmed :)
As for creating a local repository, yes, you can. It's really easy actually (I just tested it, hadn't tried myself before :>). Just run the repository configuration tool (it's called drakrpm-edit-media , catchy name I know, or you can run it from the Control Center or from within rpmdrake, the software installer). Go to 'Options' (bad menu name, I need to file a bug on that) then 'Add a custom medium'. Leave 'Type of medium' as 'Local files', give it a name (this is just a reference for you, it can be anything, probably easiest to make it one word and quite short) and then set 'Medium path' as the directory where the RPMs are. Don't worry about any of the checkboxes (you can check 'Tag this medium as an update medium' if you want it to be considered an update repository by Mandriva Update) and click OK. That's it.
229 • @215, 224: Definitions (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 17:14:14 GMT from Malaysia)
I am unable to find a definition of 'bullshit' in relation to a Linux distro but I suspect it may be closely related to the following definitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28internet%29
230 • post 224 (by Hans Fucknose on 2007-10-10 18:38:35 GMT from United States)
Are we allowed to swear in here? I didn't know that.
Yay.
231 • re 203 (by adrian15 on 2007-10-10 18:54:54 GMT from Spain)
> I tried to test it from VirtualBox.
Thank you.
> The fist menu has too short a time out (no time to concentrate/admire) => you should put at least one minute timeout for the first menu, at best an INFINITE timeout, that the user has not the impression of a taylorian against a computer....
12 secons is a short time out. Interesting. I'll try to put something bigger but 12 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 seems to me too much timeout for a default boot.
>
> The language selection is clumsy : I choose French, of course, and the menus keep on being ... in English...
The Knoppix Super Live Boot language selection is just after selecting Knoppix, currently only English and Spanish is available.
> There is no separate language and keyboard mapping selection.
Yes, there is in miscelanea. If you think I should put it in another area please tell me which one.
> I will go further one of these week-ends, but it does not appeal a slow user (do you want to limit your audience to < 35 yrs, male bachelors without professional duties?) Or is meant to other people? Who might be very happpy of NOT racing during their free time?
Ok. Thank you.
I'll try to make the timeout bigger (I already thought that 12 seconds was enough).
adrian15
232 • @184 (by adrian15 on 2007-10-10 19:00:32 GMT from Spain)
> I can see how super grub might be helpful to some just coming over to Linux, but aside from that group I don't understand how it could be useful to anyone else.
Yes, the main target are newbies.
>
> It's a simple task to boot from the live cd of your distro , drop to the cli from a terminal and chroot into your install then fix the problem.
It's a simple task simple when you know it but it is time consuming. With SGD you do not need to load a kernel and all the base OS!
adrian15
233 • Public Service Announcement: NOKEY errors with 2008 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 19:30:17 GMT from Canada)
This is for anyone getting NOKEY errors trying to install packages from the online repositories for Mandriva Linux 2008.
The problem was that the pubkey files, which contain the keys used to sign packages in each repository, were missing from the media_info directories in the 2008 tree, so when it was adding the repositories, Mandriva could not get the key for each repository. Since the repository seemed to have no key associated with it, but the packages were signed, when you tried to install any package, Mandriva would give you the NOKEY warning.
This has been fixed on our master mirror around two hours before this post. I have checked several mirrors and found that at the time of writing this post, a couple of mirrors have synced up with the fix already, but most have not.
Once all the mirrors sync up with the fix, the problem will not occur again for anyone adding repositories. However, if you have already set up your repositories, the problem will not be fixed automatically. You must remove your repositories using the repository configuration tool, which can be found in the Mandriva Control Center, or the urpmi.removemedia command line tool. You can then set the repositories up again (using the repository configuration tool, or urpmi.addmedia) and you should no longer see the errors.
I will post a follow-up message when my checks indicate that most mirrors are synced up with the fix.
We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
234 • RE 203 (by dbrion on 2007-10-10 19:38:15 GMT from France)
Instead of nitpicking with timeouts, you shoud put infinite timeouts :
the pros are
* that one can answ. the phone.
* one masters ones own time
* any one can go at his/her own step, without any race (men are not horses).
If you had showed it to anyone, and had discussed with her/him, you could easily understand why I *definitely* think these points are essential...
235 • Re 210 I wrote in a context... (by dbrion on 2007-10-10 19:49:53 GMT from France)
"dbrion wrote:
[Just add Mandriva to the list, and change installing into "buying and installing"]
You don't have to change 'installing' to 'buying and installing' as Mandriva continues to be available for download free of charge.
"
Yes , I did, but the context was an answer to {cf #206] a cry-baby who whined because he unconsideratly bought (at least, that is what he/she/it wrote) an early Powerpack.
BTW, in DW descriptions of the distributions, any Mandriva release has a price linked to her (?? infamously??) though I know you know buying is just a deliberate act (one can have it for free or at very low prices, with many nice how-tos, in the newspapers sellers in France....)
236 • Best distro (by Bill on 2007-10-10 20:29:26 GMT from United States)
My fave is Vista.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!
..er, keep your stick to yourself. .. that is, .. er,
Hey, who needs sticks when you can have the WHOLE TREE!!!
237 • Mandriva (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 20:50:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
I've just done a fresh install of mandriva 2008, I downloaded via torrent from the the link on distrowatch front page. One of the default bookmarks in epiphany web browser labelled Thawte takes me to a porn site i also get a pop-up with links to other porn sites. Is someone playing silly beggars with the torrents or has somebody at mandriva made a cock-up!!!!!
238 • Re: Mandriva not starting X (by Pless on 2007-10-10 22:27:46 GMT from Norway)
@202 by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10:
(...) but what you can do is press ctrl-alt-F1 after it fails to start X, which should give you a console login screen. (...)
if it's something deeper than just failing to start X, let me know and I'll think of something else. what's the hardware in question?
Me:
Well, ctrl-alt-F1 didn't do anything - the screen stays black and I need to cold boot. I am quite surprised by this, as I believe I have a rather vanilla system:
Mainboard: Gigabyte K8NXP-9 nForce4 Ultra
CPU: Athlon-64 3500+ S-939 2.2GHz 512kB Boxed
RAM: Corsair TWINX1024-3200XL DDR-DIMM 1024MB (Dual Channel); i.e. 2 GiB.
Video card: Sapphire Radeon X600PRO 256MB DDR PCI-Express, VIVO/DVI-I, Lite-Retail
USB: AH221 Apacer Handy Sieno USB 2.0 Flash Drive 4 GB
There's also a LG DVD reader/burner and 2 SATA disks + 3 PATA disks. SATA disks not in use, but not disabled in BIOS...
I use ADSL, PPPoE, configured for the ISP in an SMC Barricade router.
A couple of distros I have tried have had trouble configuring DHCP, but this is the first time I experience a live OS not booting to the desktop.
239 • Re: Mandriva not starting X (by Pless on 2007-10-10 22:34:36 GMT from Norway)
@238: I forgot to mention that the text output during boot mentions this (at least twice):
"The backspace key sends: ^?"
There are also error msgs just before the screen turns black and the boot process stops, but the screen turns black too fast for me to catch them...
240 • Fluxbox (by anticapitalista on 2007-10-10 22:51:48 GMT from Greece)
Can't believe no-one else has commented on the stable release of fluxbox 1.0.0. See post 165
How many distros use this WM as either default choice or include it in their repos/dvd's?
241 • CM (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 23:22:14 GMT from United States)
How many anonymous posts are hers?
242 • @238 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10 23:46:27 GMT from Canada)
Well, that's a bugger. Only thing I can think of is try booting with the USB flash drive disconnected?
243 • Puppy Linux (by JAG on 2007-10-11 00:56:54 GMT from United States)
Here's another review of puppy...
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7455536044.html
Check it out...!!!
244 • Ms Caitlyn's Oreillynet blog about a "death threat" (by Raffy on 2007-10-11 01:03:07 GMT from Philippines)
It seems that because of the large number of incoming nasty posts under an equally nasty article entitled "A Death Threat .."* by Caitlyn Martin of www.oreillynet.com , comments are now being held for approval. I saw that at least one post there by Landor about Caitlyn's inaccuracies was deleted. Caitlyn then writes that it was her editors who did it.
* http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/10/a_death_threat_from_a_puppy_li.html
Everybody is becoming a victim because of this blogging style, a flame-baiting one, as already noted in the posts above. The poster of #90 is particularly affected, as he was Caitlyn's target. I could have added salt to injury by posting the facts there, so my apologies to the poster of #90.
I have done my share by writing about the facts that I can gather, and posting in that blog as well as writing oreillynet's editors.
My fear is that if Caitlyn succeeds in what she is doing now, other distros would soon become targets of this irresponsible (deliberate or otherwise) journalism at oreillynet.
245 • puppy stuff (by jonyo on 2007-10-11 02:01:44 GMT from Canada)
For the record, in regards to the puppy death threat thing here, imho, no direct death threat was intended whatsoever by the anonymous author & the whole puppy death threat thing is silly. Very easy to jump on a word (or a few) & make anything out of it. When I ran it by my wife, she did think it came across menacing & quickly lost interest (as she often does..sigh..).
The author also stated that he (i`m assuming) is no longer even a pup distro user. And keep it mind this was from an anonymous.. So how can it be related directly to puppy whatsoever.
Though it adds greatly to drama.. :-) & interest.. Best for all involved to let it go imo.
I remember back in the day when the boss & I were on the brink & I said `Watch what you ask for` (loong story..) & she took it as a threat & said `Are you threatening me`.. I wasn`t. Intent is often the key and or what`s behind the words when they are not crystal clear.
Cheers,
ps - puppy rocks! (not for everyone though..some folks can`t stand pups, cats..whatever..) and certainely a lively bunch there. The only way to really find out what`s going on there is to check it out, spend some time and then decide for yourself. I certainely would like to see some meatheads outa there (who desn`t) ..whadayagonadoo..& good bet I`m somebodies meathead..
246 • Re: Mandriva not starting X (by Pless on 2007-10-11 02:16:15 GMT from Norway)
@242 by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-10
OK, I guess I've had it with messing with Mandriva this time around - perhaps I'll try Mandriva 2009. Or perhaps not. Anyway, thanks for your suggestions!
247 • Mandriva2008 (by Guy on 2007-10-11 02:45:46 GMT from United States)
New Mandriva works great here. Compiz - Fusion can be enabled on start up!
Cool:) Congrats!!!
248 • Re post #244 = Total Insanity ! (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 02:52:14 GMT from Canada)
FACTS:
~ FWIW I never posted on her new Blog
~ Have never heard of any book (titled "death" ?)
~ The very old homily refferenced was : "You are dead right"
~ The meaning, ostensibly, "dead_on_correct "
~Even those who clarified (it was NO THREAT) cannot refrain from their own character assassination,
as exemplified by comments to use of English. incorrect advice etal
Why ?
To publicly take cheap shots, vent their childish idiotic greivances, bruised egos
~ MarkS AFAIK - disclaims contacting CM (why not get his side of factual events)
~ As predicted, all hell has broken loose- the Paranoid Nutcases noted on her new BLogs have spoken
My harmmless well intended advisory comment, could equally have applied as:
She has not altered her mind, the non-review closed ("dead")
She claims to be (dead) right ., the orginal Blogg is now "dead" = (closed)
In fact, it was more in concern, her same In-your-face, deliberately provocative style noted in her published political views.
That may catch attention of extremists & place herself in great danger !
So how does the "Pro:" react - < BY knee-jerking, seizes it as an opportunty > to gain more publicity
Yes Raffy, you did your part in lending credence to ignorance
Your only vested concern -to separate the Murga community from complicity
Lobster did his usual devious part, by announcing "call out the dogs" which worked
They flooded CM's tasteless blog
On the new, she "claims" (un-substantiated) O'Reilly satff deleted some
Aside) _ Odd they would do so, yet leave others placing that Mgt. in
a bad light, let alone the ever present possiblity of being named as co-defendats of a libel suit brought against Ms. M ?
If Ms Martin wishes to file a law suit or contact FBI, please go ahead
She will be laughed out of court, thereafter, I will launch a libel suit,
press cost of litigation expences & compensatory damages
All who abetted, in promiting slander will be named co-conspirators, complicity proven
Addresss, identities will be relinquished via Subpoena
It was not I who first publicly noted her weird attacks on all that Linux/FOSS represent
Such as "the proliferation of half-baked useless distros-"
Get it straight ~ I never threatened the expert "Pro"
I never posted to her new paranoids revealed in all it's ugly retoric (her new soapbox)
Why would anyone continue to feed her ego ?
She is far beyond rational debate
249 • RE: 244, 245 (by Landor on 2007-10-11 03:30:20 GMT from Canada)
#244
Yes, and I find it odd they sat on her blog for such a long period and were left untouched, but upon her "return" they were deleted by the Blog Editors. Circumspect to say the least.
My intention was to show the correlation to the title of the book, which after that was understood any intelligent person could see how it was following a political line of thought in the commnet. Also pointing out she has been inaccurate to a point where a dev came here (which all who read the comments section here should be well aware of) to correct her comments, so very well could be (and is in my opinion) inaccurate in her assumption of the intent in that post.
#245
Intent in person as you said is hard to gather when you are on the outside looking in. More so for communicating via any medium that is not in person. The sad part is that most with agendas, or thin skin look for fault and jump on it, instead of looking for an alternative to their first assumption.
A man I consider a personal hero of mine that helped formed my early adult years said, "Don't pay any mind to what you think you heard, more often than not you'll look stupid, so pay attention to what you DID hear." The odd time I caught him assuming things and I reminded him of his advice he said, "that's the good thing about advice, you don't have to always follow it, even if you were the one giving it" lol
-----------
Even though I do find fault with Mz. Martin for her posting of the blog, the person I believe who should be accountable was the person who posted comment #99. I've seen many times that some things should be done about people posting comments (it even said about me). I am one for the freedom without moderation, but I will say with one exception, when it can bring some kind of harm to one, or a group, there should be some kind of intervention.
So Ladislav, I believe you to be a man of intelligence and as the user of post # 99 stated they e-mailed you and you have the ability to contact them. With that intelligence you surely must be aware that the post #90 was not a death threat and with the problems that a user caused here by going to the extreme, and by the user I mean the one who e-mailed you, I hope that you take some kind of action sot his person either understands this, or no longer has access to DW. I think it would be the right thing to do, considering the consequences one person could've caused to someone's personal life and the smear it has cast on a project that DW felt worthy enough to financially donate to.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
250 • Retraction... (by Landor on 2007-10-11 03:38:44 GMT from Canada)
Sorry Ladislav, on re-reading it doesn't say he e-mailed you, only her.
I still do hope that if you have a way to intervene, maybe by ip's logged who posted what, that you will consider it.
Keep your stick on the ice....
Landor
251 • Mandriva 2008 (by Robzilla on 2007-10-11 04:08:57 GMT from United States)
I just installed the new Mandriva 2008 and my first impressions are Wow! I can say this is the best Mandriva edition I have used yet. The system is fast and responsive. Compiz-fusion is very cool though still unstable. Everything works and this is the free version.
After my dissapointment with OpenSuse 10.3 Mandriva is simply awesome. I think they are going to give Ubuntu a real run for the money. I like Ubuntu a lot but Mandriva has really done a fantastic job with this release!!
Robzilla
252 • Puppy stuff (by roadie on 2007-10-11 04:26:19 GMT from Canada)
I see the Puppy Linux saga continues, strange how a (to me at least) benign post could create such furor. I did'nt take post #90 as a threat to Ms Martin, more on the level of rambling. Otherwise I would have responded with something like: ARE YOU NUTS?
It's actually kinda sad to see DW degenerate into what it's become, a place to come and snipe at whatever distro or person is the flavor of the week. The Puppy Linux crap does'nt belong here, nor the Mandriva & PCLinuxOS crap or any distro crap.
It's just bullshit.
I have always had the impression that DWW was a place to RATIONALLY discuss Linux distro's, could be I'm wrong as it's only recently that I've checked out the forum, actually it was the week of that disgustingly obvious attack on Puppy Linux of a couple of months ago.
Bye the bye, I see that reviewers name has been brought into the current debacle on Ms Martin's blog. They should make a great pair. Best wishes to both of them.
The weird part of it all is that Puppy will probably get more downloads and Ms Martin will probably pick up more readers, (sorry, Ms Martin, I won't be one of them) and the same bullshit will continue on next week's DWW, and thats just stupid.
roadie
253 • 252 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 04:37:48 GMT from United States)
No question about it, the DWW comments section the last few weeks is about as low as you can go.
254 • RE: 253 (by ladislav on 2007-10-11 05:15:25 GMT from Taiwan)
Yeah, it's very disappointing to see what this forum is turning into. I haven't decided what to do about this yet, but I think setting up clear rules and a stricter moderation might be the answer. Otherwise we are running a risk of all the good guys leaving this place in disgust (Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre has already promised that he would never post here again - what a pity!), while those who only contribute negativity and personal attacks are staying.
And some people still want me to allow comments in each news item on the front page!
Right now I don't see any way of this mess other than enforcing strict control over the comments and ruthlessly delete anything that breaks the rules of civility and common sense.
255 • Adam Williamson (by Dubigrasu on 2007-10-11 06:10:28 GMT from Romania)
Hi Adam!
I know that DW is not the proper place to such questions but I dare to ask:
When using the Control center to install rpm packages, is there any posibilities to keep the downloaded packages in the cache? Something like "urpmi --noclean" but with the GUI ? Like Synaptic does for example. Is there any workaround?
Thank you
256 • @255 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-11 06:16:32 GMT from Canada)
Unfortunately, there is no way to do it graphically :(. This is quite a common request, and I need to check with Thierry if there's any way we could add it without compromising the simplicity of the GUI.
257 • Follow up on NOKEY errors with Mandriva Linux 2008 online repositories (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-11 06:18:10 GMT from Canada)
A follow up on the issue of NOKEY errors when installing packages from online repositories with Mandriva Linux 2008 is here:
http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/11/public-service-announcement-nokey-errors-follow-up/
again, we're sorry about this problem.
258 • @254: Re: my comment which you just deleted (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 06:19:00 GMT from Malaysia)
"I don't see any way of this mess other than enforcing strict control over the comments and ruthlessly delete anything that breaks the rules of civility and common sense."
My comment (which you just deleted) was critical of Ms Martin's response to certain comments in this forum. "Common sense" suggests that the issue is still topical. I did not use abusive language and therefore fail to see how I broke the "rules of civility and common sense".
"I haven't decided what to do about this yet, but I think setting up clear rules and a stricter moderation might be the answer."
Yes, I do think you need to be clear about the rules. At present it looks like commentary is off-limits but flaming is acceptable e.g., #215 ("Don't pay for the @]}+ # bullshit of Mandriva"). This sort of random modding is unlikely to significantly improve the forum.
259 • Common thread (by alienjeff on 2007-10-11 06:24:23 GMT from United States)
It's interesting to note the similarity between the mod(s) on Murga's forum surreptitiously deleting posts and the recent rash of deletions in this comments area. However, at least here the mods have the gonadal fortitude to publically announce such actions.
In time, more will be revealed in re: Caitlyn Martin / Martin Feldman.
260 • 256 (by Dubigrasu on 2007-10-11 06:28:28 GMT from Romania)
Thank you for your quick response. Anyway, with or without that option Mandriva is still my favourite OS.
All the best to you and Mandriva's team...
261 • RE: 258 (by ladislav on 2007-10-11 06:31:36 GMT from Taiwan)
I've just deleted comment 215 as well. Yes, flames like that have no place here.
Please give this topic a rest.
262 • No subject (by MasterChief on 2007-10-11 06:39:22 GMT from Belgium)
Please give this topic a rest.
Than stop publishing it , I don't mind you erasing my comment ,but I do mind you keep tossing up stuff like this just to test peoples reaction Mr Ladislav ,and ofcourse money talks doesn't it?
Well ,i'll be checking my distro info somewhere else from now on.
Politiek correct denkend broekschijterke
263 • RE: 259 (by ladislav on 2007-10-11 06:50:51 GMT from Taiwan)
Believe me, I hate deleting posts! But as others remarked (and I agree with them), this forum is quickly degenerating into a sad place where soon nobody interesting will want to visit.
Stay on topic and stay civil - if you can do this, your posts won't be deleted.
264 • RE: 263 (by awong on 2007-10-11 07:03:05 GMT from Canada)
Thank you for having the courage to delete unproductive posts. I'm tired of wading through long winded posts of people who just like to blab on and on about how great their own opinions are and how worthless others' are. I want to read about Linux and not someone's overinflated ego. Hopefully this will keep new Linux users who read DWW from becoming disgusted in the community and going back to Windoze.
265 • RE: 262 (by ladislav on 2007-10-11 07:05:14 GMT from Taiwan)
I do mind you keep tossing up stuff like this just to test peoples reaction
I have no idea what you mean. The only thing I published was a review of Puppy Linux. Those who want to discuss Puppy (the product) are welcome to post here and share their experiences. But if your preferences lie in discussing reviewers from other web sites, then yes, please do everybody a favour and find another forum.
266 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 07:05:23 GMT from Canada)
We have all been duped- cannnot escape involvements
The smell lingers long after S--- has been scraped off
Ms/Mr - who cares - she/he succeeded in drawing everyone in.
If as a spin- off, Puupy gets more users > good for them
BK states his offerings are to satisfy his own hobby, selflessly shares results for all to enjoy
Whether it "fits" or not - is up to user
267 • Com 212 Wiseasses (or links) wanted for package managers eval (by dbrion on 2007-10-11 09:25:48 GMT from France)
"I don't wanna be a wiseass, but I hope someone somewhere reading this will remember: []teh notohriuz deb vs rpm issue has [..], and perhaps even NOTHING to do with dependency troubles.
!!
"
As far as I /* superficially */understood: package managers decode (ar -x xxx.deb + tar) and verify that the package (does not ) need other package, etc. The decoding is very fast, whatever the storing format; the verification can be very sophisticated, and slow, and depends on complicated software (bugs) ==> if one package manager is anormally slow at a given time, it is just circumstancial...
But this is just a superficial impression : where can one find /objective/ (not "it stucks; it is a breeze/ it is buggy/ I looove Mr xxx who "invented" it) comparisons betww. package managers and structures?
268 • re 263 (by adrian15 on 2007-10-11 09:33:44 GMT from Spain)
Hi Ladislav.
I think you have already thought about this possibility and that you do not have time to implement it. I think that DW should have a phpbb2 forum and all the comments about DW weekly issues should go there.
Moderation will be better and there would some forums like:
Distrowatch Weekly
New distributions
Linux General
OffTopic
Distribution Reviews
adrian15
269 • RE: 17 + 30 + 34 + 37 Referrer-Control in Firefox (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 10:42:35 GMT from Germany)
Install the RefControl firefox-extension. It gives you full control of the referrer. http://www.stardrifter.org/refcontrol/
Much more features than network.http.sendRefererHeader in about:config
270 • Re 272 "How could you qualify something unread?" (by dbrion on 2007-10-11 14:42:53 GMT from France)
CM seems to have very structured opinions, and sometimes, they are interesting and can teach (me, perhaps you) something.
It would be unhuman to be full time politically correct (and even intelligent)
271 • 271 • Re 272 "How could you qualify something unread?" (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 14:59:50 GMT from Malaysia)
Change of subject: dbrion, have you tried PC-BSD yet? I'm going to try installing it this weekend and would appreciate your thoughts.
272 • #267 (by herman on 2007-10-11 15:10:58 GMT from Europe)
If you want to know the difference between rpm and dpkg, just read the Red Hat and Debian documentation for distribution maintainers. Maybe it'll take a lot of space here to go into that.
What I was trying to say is that whereas the technologies of rpm and dpkg differ, each having their pros and cons, problems with dependencies do not depend on either of them. Packaging quality and repository management are solely responsible for that. The fact that some .deb-distros (Debian comes to mind ;) ) have a huge amount of 'native' packages in their repositories naturally means that there will be few issues, because you don't have to enable third party repositories that may have a less than perfect standard (you have to know you can trust the external repo, whereas it is assumed that Debian can be trusted blindly).
On the other hand, say you have a CentOS 5 box with good 3rd party repos such as epel and rpmforge, or Fedora with Livna, the likelihood of having dep. issues is as small as when you run Ubuntu with Multiverse enabled, maybe even smaller. Rpmforge is just as well a part of the community as 'multiverse' is to Ubuntu, albeit maybe a bit more independent. Since package quality is good, I have never had any issues in the past couple of years on CentOS or Fedora.
Maybe it's a secret, but the reason for many people to run Fedora/CentOS is polish under the hood. :)
273 • RE 271 (second 271! I hope the number stays) PC BSD (by dbrion on 2007-10-11 15:16:41 GMT from France)
I tried a former version of PC-BSD in February 2007, with unaccelerated qemu {the host being Mandriva 2006+ upgrades, the guest was PCBSD)...It was very easy to install, and did not need any babysitting : you just quicly indicate what you want, and the job is done without interaction [I just went gardening...]
(I suppose the next version is still better).
I was glad to know I could get or [compile + test ] anything I need (though it is very slow under qemu)... The only flaw I fear (and I could find out how to simply test under qemu) is the capacity of dual/multiboot (suppose Linux becomes as viruses hassled as Windows : having a triboot system would remain comfortable).
I hope you ll be as satisfied with PCBSD as I was... Good luck...
274 • RE another 271 : PCBSD (by dbrion on 2007-10-11 15:25:27 GMT from France)
I tried it as a guest uner quemu (the host being Mandriva 2006.0) and was quite satisfied with it in feb. 2007 (I suppose newer versions are better) : I could have or [compile and test ] anything I wanted.
The install is very comfortable: interactions with te user are only at the beginning (no baby sitting) so one can do any thing while *ones computer* works!
The main thing I forgot/did not dare to test was its ability as dual/multiboot (there were some annoying posts last week about this matter)....
Have a nice weekend...
275 • pup stuff (by jonyo on 2007-10-11 15:57:50 GMT from Canada)
#197 • RE post #193 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-10 04:12:35 GMT from Canada)
All dark sides of Puppy community is only possible when approved by administrators/cronies
It UNJUSTLY tars all Puppy users as being fanatical zealots
======================================================
Agreed but wouldn't say they are fanatical zealots at all, overall in my experience (no doubt there are a few..) though it may come across that way with all the baloney that is going on.
Most pup users are very impressed, positive, very helpfull & highly satisfied with pup.
They will vigorously put forward its merits against all comers but I don't see that as much different than any other distro from what i've seen.
I say bad apples not dealt with and or thrown out spoils the bunch. But that's just my 2c on it.
Being a relative noob to linux It seems that there are issues of free speech & linux out there that I can't say I know much about, that imo are problematic in a forum, as has been shown here when there are no clear rules & or guidelines with active moderation if required.
276 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 16:01:18 GMT from United States)
"But if your preferences lie in discussing reviewers from other web sites, then yes, please do everybody a favour and find another forum."
Amen to that.
In my opinion, the discussion should be limited to the material in that issue of DWW, plus perhaps other major news in the Linux world that came out after DWW was published.
We don't need inappropriate language and attacks based on the language of the post. We don't need someone posting about how Windows is better.
(In my opinion also) there should be a restriction on certain comments about distros. Negative comments of the form "Distro X sucks" don't bring much value but they do generate responses. Even "Distro X is better than Distro Y" without saying why that is the case is useless and leads to responses. I like to hear problems and negative experiences about distros, but that is different.
In any event, thanks for addressing this issue, and I look forward to what you decide to do. Maybe a member of the community will help out. I'm sure you have better things to do than babysit these comments.
277 • Mandriva (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 16:35:11 GMT from United States)
Well the install doesn't default install grub to the mbr. Great, why would you not choose that as the default for grub? I still have lilo kicking around from my previous install. Sigh...
The artwork is a rip off of Fedora 6, except Fedora's dna looked better. Well I'll have to see, I have to try again to get it installed correctly.
278 • Re post #90 (by Anonymous on 2007-10-11 16:58:13 GMT from Canada)
It has come to my attention, one poster needs clarification
They glanced at the post, came to habitually incorrect conclusions
It was 3 SEPARATE liveCD Puppy VERSIONS that booted & all worked as released, intended
ONE disk happened to be with me,, so it was used on two separate occassions - to, both in a very few minutes:
Solve separate causes - if it was the ISP,. software or hardware at fault.
I knew exactly what to do from the CLI, then applied it
That was one of very few times Puppy was used, ~ Why ? _
Upon close examination of their bash coding, it was of no use towards personal stripping
then mastering > if using their flawed processes
Flaws that were a hindrance to some users, not for me (unless adopted as is)
Once again, dead-reckoning (sea term ancestry ?) of "course", proved dead-on right
279 • ubuntu gutsy RC is out....jay (by stefan on 2007-10-11 19:19:43 GMT from Netherlands)
i will probably wait for fedora8 or at least for ubuntu 7.10 final. but for those interested i just noticed that the beta download links have been replaced with ubuntu Release Candidate.
280 • Happy with Mandriva 2008 ! (by Caraibes on 2007-10-11 21:01:44 GMT from Dominican Republic)
You guys might have read my experience with openSUSE 10.3... It wasn't bad. I enjoy test-driving it...
But still I wiped it for Mandriva 2008, and I must say, everything is BETTER, smoother... Easier to configure (this might not be very objective, since I have been using most Mandriva release since 3 years...)
Anyway, I really prefer Mndriva, but this is not to say Suse was bad. Mandriva is just more my taste. (I dual-boot it with F7).
Once you configure the Easy-Urpmi repos, you have a bunch of apps available...
Good job to the team !
281 • Debacle (by Landor on 2007-10-11 21:07:01 GMT from Canada)
I don't know much about you other than what I have read on other sites, a few little snippets in the articles and your about me page. Though someone else has played the money part, I don't believe it.
So I'd like to apologize for even if unintentionally, playing a part in what has caused something to be less enjoyable for you that you enoyed doing for Linux and the community. Especially not long after the attacks that you spent many a sleepless hour trying to recover from Ladislav.
Landor
282 • Wow a super SUSE Distro (by Luis Medina on 2007-10-12 00:10:47 GMT from Mexico)
I did read a recent review of OpenSuse 10.3 and i wondered with the interface, and the new desktop. But i still wait to vew the ubuntu to compare and change to suse or keep with ubuntu
283 • post # whatever: (by Hairwad on 2007-10-12 00:48:25 GMT from United States)
"Yeah, it's very disappointing to see what this forum is turning into. I haven't decided what to do about this yet, but I think setting up clear rules and a stricter moderation might be the answer. Otherwise we are running a risk of all the good guys leaving this place in disgust (Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre has already promised that he would never post here again - what a pity!), while those who only contribute negativity and personal attacks are staying.
And some people still want me to allow comments in each news item on the front page!
Right now I don't see any way of this mess other than enforcing strict control over the comments and ruthlessly delete anything that breaks the rules of civility and common sense."
And what is the reason for keeping this "comments" area here? It serves no purpose.. and it is full of personal attacks and spamming for PCLinuxOS and blogger's extended crap. Why not just eliminate this so-called "comments" area from www.distrowatch.com and let us enjoy the site for what it reallly means: analysis and comparison of the various Linux distributions.
Proudly *not* the stick on the ice guy,
- Hairwad
284 • RE: 283 (by ladislav on 2007-10-12 01:04:49 GMT from Taiwan)
And what is the reason for keeping this "comments" area here? It serves no purpose.
If memory serves me right, the word "forum" was invented in ancient Rome as a place where people could discuss various issues of public interest. The same is true here. I (or one of the contributors) sometimes present a controversial opinion which many people will disagree with, so they have an option to post their own views. I don't provide a way to comment on the front page, because it only carries facts. But to present an opinion and deny others to have their say sounds counterproductive in this age of the Internet. How will I ever find out that I am wrong if I don't allow people to correct me?
Saying that a forum has no purpose is like saying that democracy has no purpose....
285 • @280 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-12 01:11:58 GMT from Canada)
Great news, glad to hear it's working out for you!
286 • 273, 274: PCBSD (by Anonymous on 2007-10-12 03:17:58 GMT from Malaysia)
Thanks, dbrion. Yes, I'm a bit worried about the dual-boot too, so I'm going to try it on my spare machine. Will let you know how it goes.
Have a good weekend.
287 • Puppy 3.0 (by roadie on 2007-10-12 05:49:48 GMT from Canada)
I've been playing with Puppy 3.0 for the last few hours and have to say I'm impressed.
On first boot I was able to customize the X config with the wizard, and it actually worked, I've seen others that did'nt. It also detected my sound card with no problem.
I run it as a "frugal" install, (I hate burning CD's) and after rebooting it with the saved configs, it booted to the desktop in 34 seconds on an AMD Duron 800, not too shabby.
On first boot tho, I had no internet, the sis900 module was'nt loaded or available. After a reboot the modules .sfs file was loaded, and I was able to set up the ethernet with no problems, why it took a reboot to do it I don't know.
Now the desktop, yeah the desktop. It's cluttered. Thats the only way to put it, there are icons all over the place. It's easy to get rid of them by right clicking and choosing "remove item(s)" so not a huge deal.
The background is plain blue, I can live with that, but just like I thought, it can be easily changed and I did. Ended up with a puppy (of course) with the biggest eyes I've ever seen. Really, they're huge. In fact the whole head is huge. But cute.
Like the review mentioned, there are wizards to no end in Puppy, there's even a Wizards Wizard to oversee them all and they seem to work well.
One problem I had was with Gxine, it would start playing an audio file and then freeze partway in. Running it from a console showed no errors and the gxine error log showed this: "AFD changed from -2 to -1"
Gxine itself did'nt show a -2 at any time when running or an ability to change to it.
So I don't know what that's about.
I'm not really struck on Seamonkey as a browser, I prefer Firefox, but it works well, did'nt try the mail end of it.
The package management was not perfect, installing "pup-gets" worked well but "dot-pups" gave md5sum errors every time. At least I was able to install Midnight Commander. (how does anyone live without it?)
All in all, I think Puppy is well designed for it's intended audience, which I imagine is new Linux users, it's had a tremendous amount of time and thought put into making it easy to use. It has a lot of applications crammed into -100 megs, but then again so does Nimblex100, and it's got Kde and it's more Slacky.
In the end, I need more Slacky but yeah, Puppy 3.0 is rather impressive.
roadie
288 • RE 272 (the endgueltiges one) Thanks for the info abt the meaning (by dbrion on 2007-10-12 10:20:28 GMT from France)
"If you want to know the difference between rpm and dpkg, just read the Red Hat and Debian documentation for distribution maintainers. Maybe it'll take a lot of space here to go into that.
"
This was an answer to 267, which is almost a rhetorical question {as *.rpm and *.deb have the same info, there cannot be any superiority of a format : even some smart package managers can handle both}. I maintain that links to some doc related to some controversial issues (without any rational reason) should be useful, but I think it not *your* (nor mine) duty......
of the rpm vs deb controversy.
You are right (imo) pointing out that the quality of the repos is (in a perfect world, should be, anyway, now) one of the decision leading criteria... BTW, I was very (and happily) surprised by the unused quality of Mandriva 2008.0 {vs 2007.0} (at least in betas, Rcs.... will wait till due time for the official one and her errata list, thinking of the traffic-jams ....).
BTW, pple (at least those I know) having Whitebox never need to upgrade (or , soemtimes, they recompile new (versions of ) applications => it is the advantage, at least for RedHat derived, to choose them in reverse alphabetical order, meseems... This makes, at least for my colleagues, the short time release cycles meaningless and perhaps even a waste of time...
289 • Microsoft sues Red Hat and Novell...indirectly (by Anonymous on 2007-10-12 13:15:02 GMT from United States)
Kind of funny how M$ is trying to sue Red Hat and Novell via the IP Innovation company. If you look at Vista (I know, it's hard to look at that poop), they stole most of the 3D effects of the desktop from Linux. And I'm sure M$ stole more than that over the years.
290 • @289 (by Adam Williamson on 2007-10-12 15:46:07 GMT from Canada)
This has been argued at Slashdot.
Windows had compositing effects during Vista's beta stages, as early as 2005. This is around the same time they were being developed for Linux, and OS X had them earlier.
Desktop compositing is not a particularly difficult concept to come up with, and one that many people had thought of years before. It's just that the hardware and software framework to make it happen only really started emerging around 2004-2005, so that's when it was implemented in all major OSes. It's silly to suggest that any of them 'copied it' from the others, as I said, it's a pretty obvious idea that many people had already had and talked about.
Now, specific compositing *effects* you can certainly talk about copying. Like...Compiz ripping off Expose wholesale. :)
291 • I'm liking openSuSE more and more (by jeff_s on 2007-10-12 21:30:34 GMT from United States)
I'm loving the over all look and feel. The green is great. The artwork is excellent.
I'm starting to really like Yast, as I get more used to it.
I love the the "One Click Install", it's super smooth, easy, and fast.
The overall system just feels solid.
The speed and responsiveness is very good, especially after removing Beagle.
Boot time is the fastest I've experienced with any distro. Only Slackware comes close.
The software repositories are extensive. They're not as extensive as Debian/Ubuntu's, but still great. And with Java and Mono stuff (yes, I'm a programmer by profession) is more extensive, complete, and up to date (Eclipse in SuSE repos is 3.3, in Ubuntu it's 3.2, for instance).
I did not like the application browser at all at first. But it has grown on me. It's slow the first time it's loaded, but fast every time there after. And yes, it does involve more clicks than a regular menu. But it looks really nice, and it's easy and intuitive to browse. Besides, it's easy to remove the regular "Computer" menu, and replace it with the standard Gnome menu bar.
I like the codec installer. When I clicked one of the pre-configured streams in Banshee, it did not have the necessary fluendo codec, but asked me if I wanted it to go fetch it, which it did from the "One Click Install" site, and about 30 seconds later it worked. Great stuff.
I earlier complained about the super long install. But that was my fault because I left the "enable online repositories" checkbox checked. This caused it download another gig or so of packages, and it took 2-1/2 hours to complete the install. When I tried doing another install, I unchecked this option, and it took 40 minutes (this is on a cheapo lappy that has a 1.2 GHz Via chip - if it were on faster/more up to date cpu, it would have taken half the time.
I've never been a regular SuSE user before. I've occasionally dabbled with it, but never stuck with it. But this time, I'm really really liking it, a lot. It's going to stick around has my primary OS on my laptop for awhile.
I might also dual boot it with Ubuntu via Lubi.
292 • Gobuntu & RE: 287 + 291 (by Landor on 2007-10-12 23:36:40 GMT from Canada)
was curious to see what would be and what wouldn't be either detected or configured on my computer so I thought I'd give the new RC of Gobuntu a shot.
I think it's a great idea for a way to bring Open Source compliance to the manufacturers. I know it's nothing new either, but still a good thing to see, maybe one day none of us will have to worry about hardware or codecs, etc and Open Source will be the standard.
Today's not that day though, and neither was it for Gobuntu on my system :)
I can't give a good review of it since the only thing detected was my sound. Any regulard aspect of it seemed good, although it was gnome and since my network wasn't setup I didn't try to get the kde install from the repos (if it exists for gobuntu :) ).
#287
Roadie, did you see he even lowered the size of the NimbleX cd to 69 mb I think? The 99 mb cd now has more apps, amazing what that dude is doing.
I still haven't taken 3.0 for a spin. I'm hoping this weekend will give me a bit more time to, and right now the lad is asking me if I can take him so he can buy a webcam (a girl he likes has one, I'll be monitoring that boy even more now, I might be too scared to look though..lol). I think I'm gonna give puppy the USB stick install and see how it acts with that. Try something different.
#291
Jeff,
After looking at a couple posts here (including yours) and a lot of concern regarding beagle (I've seen Sabayon had trouble with it too) I think I'm going to give 10.3 another look, I still have it installed, and disable beagle and a couple other things and see how the performance changes on my system. I do like the green too :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
293 • Re #292 (by roadie on 2007-10-13 02:17:34 GMT from Canada)
Landor,
I've tried both the 69 & Sub100 Nimblex, actually running Sub100 now. The 69meg does'nt have GTK or multimedia and I used it only until I got the Sub100 which was'nt long.
But for a download of that size, it's great, easily extendable with Bogdan's modules or Slax-6 .lzm modules tho with the 69meg, I imagine there will be lots of missing dependencies for apps.
But , yeah, it's a very nice little distro.
roadie
294 • Strange Page Hit Ranking (by Gadesz on 2007-10-13 06:19:59 GMT from New Zealand)
I know you guys said nothing wrong with your Page Hit Ranking... but it is very strange PCLinuxOS 2007 always on the front with at least 500-600 hits. However nothing mayor happen with PCLinuxOS since 21 May 2007, when the last version come out... Other distros like OpenSuse and Ubuntu just come out with lots of interest, downloads and page hits... still can't reach PCLinuxOS because it is moving higher and higher for whatever reason... very-very suspicious...
Pity, I used to like your Page Hit Ranking, but I have a feeling it maybe manipulated and miss lead.
295 • Ubuntu Forums Membership (English language only) now over 400K (by Congrats! on 2007-10-13 06:57:37 GMT from Australia)
Ubuntu Forums Statistics
Threads: 559,818, Posts: 3,513,707, Members: 400,251
-----------------
That is an increase of some 150k in approx 6 mths.
Other language Ubuntu forums have 200K + membership
Conclusion: Ubuntu forum membership is MASSIVE and way ahead of any other linux distro! I expect that this time next year (if not earlier) Ubuntu's international forum and list membership will reach 1 million +!
296 • Re: #295 (by linbetwin on 2007-10-13 10:17:56 GMT from Romania)
But ubuntu.com and ubuntuforums.org are down today.
297 • Re: #295 (by mahughesnh on 2007-10-13 11:39:00 GMT from United States)
But how many of those forum members are active?
I have a membership on the Ubuntu forum from about a year ago, but I have not used it in over 6 months as I dumped Ubuntu in favor of openSuse 10.2 which I find, on my hardware at least, to be a superior distro.
So, even though I don't use Ubuntu any longer, even though I am not active on the forum, I am still counted as a member. I am sure I am not the only one. So that number of forum members is both accurate and inaccurate.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that Ubuntu and its siblings are the most popular distros as far a number of users is concerned.
298 • pup stuff (by jonyo on 2007-10-13 14:23:11 GMT from Canada)
287 • Puppy 3.0 (by roadie on 2007-10-12 05:49:48 GMT from Canada)
All in all, I think Puppy is well designed for it's intended audience, which I imagine is new Linux users, it's had a tremendous amount of time and thought put into making it easy to use. It has a lot of applications crammed into -100 megs, but then again so does Nimblex100, and it's got Kde and it's more Slacky.
==============================================
While the official vers excel for "new linux users" It is but a building block from where one can move onto whatever levels one desires. A ton of options.
I'd say the intended audience can be at any level. There are many other enthusiast based pup variants, to many to list.
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Puplets
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=21636
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php?f=35
299 • Re #294 & 298 (by roadie on 2007-10-13 15:54:48 GMT from Canada)
#294
I personally don't look at the Page Hit Ranking, I don't believe it is a reliable indicator of popularity. Even with what ladislav has done to stop manipulation of it, there are always ways to do that. And with the, shall we say "zeal" exhibited by some of the distro diciples, I'm quite sure ways around ladislav's security are being attempted.
#298
quote: It is but a building block from where one can move onto whatever levels one desires. A ton of options. /quote
Viewed in that context, almost any distro could be considered a "building block".
Puppy comes with all the applications most "new users" would need to do everyday computing. Even has more then one version of some, editors for example, not sure what others. And hardware detection seems to be good, therefore making it much easier for users who know very little or nothing about setting up sound cards, internet, screen resolutions, etc:
Sure, you can build a bigger, different system with the "basic" Puppy, but to me at least, something like Slax Frodo is a building block, it's console based. And something like LFS could be considered even more of a building block. And I'm sure there are lots more.
My point was that Puppy 3.0 booted fine on my machine, detected my hardware well, made it easy to get a good screen resolution and had any application I would need in it all ready to go.
I figure "new Linux users" would appreciate that.
But there ya go, you say tomato, I say tomatoe, it's still a fruit. Or is it a vegie? At least it's still Linux.
Just my view.
roadie
300 • @294 (by DrDOS on 2007-10-13 16:10:44 GMT from United States)
Well pclos has more than 400k downloads from the repositories but that's no indication of how many actual installs. I know I've installed it about 6 times, not counting reinstalls of the test versions. As far as promoting it is concerned it's almost all word of mouth, people telling other people on other forums to try it out. As far as it still increasing, that's not too hard to figure out, people are always going to check out the topmost link on the page, they certainly aren't going to click the bottommost.
I don't think anyone has installed an 'bots on Windows machines that makes them go to the DW home page and click on the pclos link, if that's what you're thinking! And I don't know of any organized effort to click it, that is actually discourage on all the related forums. In fact even mentioning the DW ranking is practically forbidden.
As for not having any upgrades, it's a rolling upgrade system, the total upgrades are about 500mb now, so it's actually more up to date than a lot of the more recent releases.
301 • pup stuff (by jonyo on 2007-10-13 20:42:18 GMT from Canada)
299 • Re #294 & 298 (by roadie on 2007-10-13 15:54:48 GMT from Canada)
But there ya go, you say tomato, I say tomatoe, it's still a fruit. Or is it a vegie? At least it's still Linux.
====================================================
Should be ok as long as the..uhmm.. dreaded 'd' word is no used..lol..
302 • RE: 297 - I'm one of those thousands (by KimTjik on 2007-10-13 21:54:06 GMT from Sweden)
"But how many of those forum members are active?"
I started one thread more than 6 months ago, because I decided to finally test Ubuntu for real (historically I've had a real struggle getting *buntu working on my hardware). I did choose the only viable option, the "Alternative CD". I had a specific issue with it locking the hard drive in one of my systems, so I decided to start a thread about. That thread soon turned into something more of blog (I've got only one response while keeping writing new posts once or twice a week for a month).
Don't feel offended *buntu users, because I'm not at all critical of you distro, or of any distro really, but my point is that size doesn't necessarily translate into something positive for its userbase. Of course you should be happy about such impressive figures, I'm not denying you that. Still I'm quite sure that many of us find some smaller forums more useful.
I like the diversity.
303 • RE:293 (by Landor on 2007-10-13 21:56:29 GMT from Canada)
I was finally able to spend a bit of time with puppy and actually nimblex. I have to admit (other than all the shortcut eye candy lol) I liked puppy, for the first time too. I never had anything against it other than being full of the shortcuts and the lighter apps aren't what I'm accustom to. I'm sure if I started out with the software I would look at kde based apps and others differently.
I did have a problem with ndiswrapper. I'm a bit hardcore when it comes to things. When I went wireless that meant I am staying wireless, so I won't even hook up a cable to download something needed to go wireless. I tried the ndiswrapper option from the more part of the network configuration tool and it kept coming up with some blank screen. I tried futiley to get it to work and dropped to the command line and just did ndiswrapper -i etc, modprobe ndiswrapper, and went through the wizard again as the module was loaded, saved it all for the reboot and when I logged in again I had to manually bring everything back up. It faired better than nimbleX though, since I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to run ndiswrapper even from the command line.
In my opinion and on my hardware, nimbleX beat puppy at boot time from the cd, but lagged a lot off the usb and puppy booted far faster. I still believe on the box I was using they're both faster from the cd than PCLOS or even openSUSE.
The only thing, and I noticed someone else found this as redundant as I, was burning a cd to just install it on another removable medium like a pendrive.
I did look at how to customize puppy (after I deleted all the shortcuts lol) and it's pretty straight forward for the wm, but it seems fine enough and I like how puppy looks basically now compared to how it did before, though I forget what version. I still prefer kde and it would be easy enough to rebuild it to a kde desktop and add some of the programs I prefer, but then I guess it's becoming what I already have, a custom build of Gentoo.
That was the dilemma my son and I both faced when I returned to Linux, I didn't like all the software, shortcuts, etc. So we decided to go it from a base system like Gentoo. Just our preference, and I'm sure my thoughts influenced my son's in regard to what is better or not. Although he likes something like aMsn and I prefer Kmess. As you said, it comes down to, you say tomato, I say tomatoe.
My son ended up hopping on that box for a bit and trying out puppy and nimblex and he took his own pendrive and made it dual boot, he just got a lappy from school (lucky kid) and it's kind've restricted, instead of messing with it, he's going to just boot up puppy or nimblex when he's in school to see what he can do. I told him, if he's still blocked, just scan for another access point and log into that :).
All in all, they're both pretty decent for what they are, and my opinion on puppy has changed a bit.
Keep your stick on the ice..
Landor
304 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2007-10-14 01:08:12 GMT from Australia)
300 • @294 (by DrDOS United States)
>Well pclos has more than 400k downloads from the repositories but that's no indication of how many actual installs.<
Yes, its NO proof at all! I have also downloaded it (and many other distros, too, from various servers) several times. But I threw it in the bin because it did NOT work on my hardware. Also, I can't stand its cheap touting followers!.
>As far as promoting it is concerned it's almost all word of mouth, people telling other people on other forums to try it out.<
I see the "word of mouth" methodology all over the place! :-(
Others might view this a little more than spamming!
Does the following ring a bell for you?
t was, by general consensus, one of the most entertaining posts for some time. Answering the usual "what is the best distro" question, a poster in last week's DistroWatch Weekly came up with the following parody (reprinted here for those who don't read the comments, but who enjoy a good laugh every now and then): "This is an interesting meta discussion, but I just have to post here to mention the Greatest Linux Distro out there: (fill in the blank).....http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20071008
> As far as it still increasing, that's not too hard to figure out, people are always going to check out the topmost link on the page, they certainly aren't going to click the bottommost.<
If that was the case, then PCL would never have reached the top, would it now? Ubuntu was top and, if we follow your theory, it would have remained there! :-)
The person you are responding to has a perfect right to question the so called "ranking" accuracy. PCL "popularity" certainly only applies to this site and that should tell you something.
>I don't think anyone has installed an 'bots on Windows machines that makes them go to the DW home page and click on the pclos link, if that's what you're thinking! <
You don't know that, do you? It does not even have to be someone from PCL, it may be others doing it for their own reasons. IMO, it would not be too hard to manipulate page hits for someone with the right knowhow and access to, and control of, servers. There are plenty Linux people in IT, and not just in Western countries.
>And I don't know of any organized effort to click it, that is actually discourage on all the related forums. In fact even mentioning the DW ranking is practically forbidden.<
Haha, PCL forumers are always going on about how they are "No1", even some of their admins/developers. IMHO, they are suffering serious delusion!
Politics can be a dirty business, whether in world affairs or any other area, including Linux (software business). Just remember (or, if you don't know, find out) who was aligned with Stalin in WII, who was supporting Osama against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who is now giving arms to the PLO (Fatah). There might be third parties (for economic reasons) who do not wish to see Ubuntu (or RH and Novell) gain/maintain momentum. SCO attacks on Linux are another example where an opportunistic third force comes into play.
It all might just be a cruel joke!?
305 • re: 304 (by beany on 2007-10-14 04:29:13 GMT from United States)
I agree with you 100%, people should never "tout" their distro here. Especially "cheap" people who use those free linux distributions. This forum is for bashing, when are these people gong to learn? Or maybe they are "bots" sent here to alter the rankings.
"Word of mouth is Spam"?
Sound more like tripe IMHO........ ;-{)
306 • Dear anonimous from Australia (by nedvis on 2007-10-14 05:37:05 GMT from United States)
You might not like to hear this but if PCLinuxOS have approximately 250-300 downloads recorded everyday at Belgium mirror site only:
( ftp://ftp.belnet.be/pub/mirror/pclinuxonline.com/live-cd/english/preview )
why would it be impossible for PCLinuxOS to have 2500-3000 hits daily on Distrowatch.
Just open your browser and type this address:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_ionfiles&Itemid=28
Then, refresh the page like every hour or so.
You'd be surprised how quickly the numbers are going upwards.
We had lot of debate about Distrowatch page hits ranking and there's not much left to add.
It's very clear (at least to me) that Linux newbies would rather have a look at Distrowatch when sniffing around and looking for latest news and trends in Linux world than to visit distro specific WEB sites.
I don't think many Fedora, Gentoo or Slackware and Debian funboys or aficionados are visiting Distrowatch everyday. They have their "high-profile" distros and perhaps more important things to with their
tux boxes than checking "how's my darling distro doing today"- everyday.
I have both PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu installed on my computers , besides Debian Etch, FreeBSD and Slackware, and
I've never opened an account at Ubuntu, Debian nor Fedoraproject forums but I do have an account at PCLinuxOS.
And you know what : I found PCLinuxOS forums more
relaxing and friendly than any of Ubuntu forum threads. Same apply for Fedora and other forums.
I had to shell out 40 dollars for A.Hudson & P.Hudson Ubuntu Unleashed a 870 pages book to dig deeper in Ubuntu internals and if there was a similar book about PCLinuxOS I would pay even more since I found it's simple true: PCLinuxOS is superior to Ubuntu !
And I can't care less about Hits Per Day ranking system.
I use to test Linux distros on my six machines weekly and what I found about them is only my experience which I like to share with other people but never pretend to be the only one who knows everything.
There's no Linux review, "hits per day" nor any other raking system or authority who can force me to use distro XYZ instead of distro ABC or bar me from using PCLinuxOS as my OS of choice for my day-to-day computing instead of Ubuntu for which I have all due respect.
There are many Linux camps ( not really to many ) and what's happening in Linux arena is still very interesting attractive and unpredictable story. The more I learn about Linux the less I'm eager to argue over distro variants so I'm just more and more Linux "poliglot" than Linux zealot. OK ?!?
And that's why I found your findings about PCLinuxOS ranking on
Distrowatch top 100 list boring and worthless as everything coming from
anonimous impersonalized and suspitious sources.
Good luck Ausie
and
keep ice on your stick ;-)
307 • @273, 274: PC-BSD (by Anonymous on 2007-10-14 07:38:57 GMT from Malaysia)
Just installed PC-BSD 1.4. Installation was quite similar to Linux except that the drives are numbered differently, it shouldn't be installed to an extended partition and the PC-BSD bootloader shouldn't be installed to MBR. Added a chainloader +1 entry to the Linux grub menu and am able to boot into BSD, Linux and Windows without any problems. :-)
On first boot, I was given a choice of video driver (nv or nvidia) without having to manually edit xorg.conf. OpenOffice.org and Firefox are on the 2nd (optional) CD which I'm downloading at the moment. Also have to figure out whether ndiswarapper can be used, but it's looking good so far. :-)
308 • @294, 300, 304: PCLinuxOS (by Anonymous on 2007-10-14 07:57:14 GMT from Malaysia)
["PCL "popularity" certainly only applies to this site and that should tell you something .... There might be third parties (for economic reasons) who do not wish to see Ubuntu (or RH and Novell) gain/maintain momentum."]
This Page Hit Ranking discussion is getting boring. I think we should let Ladislav have the last word on this topic: ["The fact that PCLinuxOS is at number one in DistroWatch's page hit ranking statistics DOES NOT mean that PCLinuxOS is the most popular distribution. It simply means that more people visited the PCLinuxOS page than any other page on DistroWatch during the past six months. Please don't take the rankings for more than they are!"] (DWW 222, comment #232).
309 • installation to hd (by John Collins on 2007-10-14 12:21:26 GMT from United States)
Installer does not work, I tried kde & gnome on the iso cds, neither would install. Thank You
310 • RE 307 Happy to know PC-BSD works (by dbrion on 2007-10-14 12:41:35 GMT from France)
at least partially. and I thank you for the info.
I had qemu-tested a previous version in early 2007, and it was satisfying for me , as I intend to have a tri-boot when, either
a) I break one of my laptops.
b) the price of HW gets low (it is very different from "getting lower and lower", I agree with that aspect ... and wait...) or the US$ stops s(hr)inking.
I tried its ability to add new disks, and to write on FAT32 filesystems .. At this time, it was too early to test for ntfs, and I forgot to test the ability of triple boot (qemu is slow).....
I fear/feel the newer version is better than the former one (they seem to release when they think they are ready, with much testing, and without too much users/(?shareholders?) pressure.
311 • pclos - its all in the name (by kiss on 2007-10-14 13:03:47 GMT from Canada)
Think about it - your a windows user that hears about linux - find distrowatch - looks at the list of distros.
Which one looks like it is a windows replacement - hhhmmmmmmmm!
add to that the fact that pclinuxos works without any command line, cut n paste, etc, etc
the repos are as up to date as any other distro and talking of other distros.....
Mandriva 2008 - spam , confusng repo setup , lots of stuff that dosent work.
Suse - deal with the devil
Ubuntu - thousands of bugs - tho gutsy is what im writing this from - generally its a nice distro BUT cant play dvds?!?
Fedora - nice
Mint - one good release a year - the second one
312 • RE 311 Some distros are bigger than their name (by dbrion on 2007-10-14 13:52:46 GMT from France)
"
Mandriva 2008 - spam , confusng repo setup , lots of stuff that dosent work.
"
Which "stuff" ??????
Glad to read from a spam expert.....
313 • spam (by reply on 2007-10-14 17:03:35 GMT from Canada)
check the mandriva forum - for the spam problem
Number of Comments: 313
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| • Issue 1099 (2024-12-02): AnduinOS 1.0.1, measuring RAM usage, SUSE continues rebranding efforts, UBports prepares for next major version, Murena offering non-NFC phone |
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| • Issue 1078 (2024-07-08): Changing init software, server machines running desktop environments, OpenSSH vulnerability patched, Peppermint launches new edition, HardenedBSD updates ports |
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| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
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| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
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| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
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| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Issue 1045 (2023-11-13): Fedora 39, how to trust software packages, ReactOS booting with UEFI, elementary OS plans to default to Wayland, Mir gaining ability to split work across video cards |
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